A Numbered Existence
by NGTM-R
Summary: The life and times of the Numbers, in relation to In The Service.
1. Sette

I like character studies. Does it show?

**Sette  
**

_I will get out of here, Father._ The cell was many things, but it was not cold. It was metal, small, featureless, perhaps even dank for brief time when the environmentals had malfunctioned. But it was not cold.

The Bureau were adept jailers. Sette had never harbored real thoughts of escape, which was just as well. There were no weaknesses in the system to exploit, and even if she could escape from this cell, there was nowhere to go. That had been the point of the Orbital Penal Complexes: even if you could escape your cell, there was only hard vacuum outside the walls of the prison itself.

But they were not cruel jailers, and the cell was never cold. She never wanted for food or water. When her cybernetics malfunctioned, they were fixed. When she felt ill, they treated her, without even her needing to say something.

_I will get out of here, Father._ They were not unkind. She had options for recreation as well. A hand gesture could have summoned something to read or watch.

It was, in fact, a better existence then she had had before by most measures; she didn't have to fight, and her access to reading materials was considerably less restricted.

She did neither. She sat upright on her bed, or she slept in the same posistion, save when she ate or had to relieve herself. And she thought, contemplated. It might even count as meditation, if you discarded what she was thinking about. It had started small, after all. It hadn't even been about her at first, but about Tre. Then with a moment of genuine horror she had realized Uno was a part of it too.

_I will get out of here, Father._ Jail had tried to kill her. To kill them. Her father had, by both his action and inaction, nearly killed her. When Quattro had decided to collapse the base in a rather spiteful attempt on Testarossa's life, Testarossa had quite reasonably warned Jail that it would kill him too. Jail Scaligetti, being himself, had a backup plan for his own death as well. But he didn't have one for the deaths of his servants.

That meant that Quattro had also tried to kill her, Tre, and Uno. And there would be no coming back for them. Jail might be reborn good as new, but they would not. Oh, perhaps Jail would ressurect them in time, new bodies, but their memories, their personalities, would be irretrivably lost. And considering Quattro would by default have become the right-hand cyborg, Sette had every reason to doubt the replacements of Tre and Uno would have been anything like the originals. More like her, perhaps, but she lacked the ego to be flattered by it and had the wisdom to see that this was not necessarily wise.

Perhaps the Doctor had not realized this. And if anyone believed that, Sette was fairly sure she could also convince them they were capable of breathing the vacuum outside this prison. Jail Scaligetti was a supremely intelligent man with thought processes that worked like lightning. He would have guessed the ramifications of the scenario that played out long before they had ever actually happened. He knew that by not stopping Quattro, he would lose two of his eldest and most trusted daughters. It had not concerned him.

_I will get out of here, Father._ It had been mere discomfort at first. But Sette knew that her realization was significant, and she had pondered its significance. Discomfort had grown to bitterness. Father had always taken care to present himself as a loving, caring man to his daughters. At the final extremity, forced to choose between the life of his daughters and slaving his wounded ego, Jail had chosen his ego. All the kindness, the love, had been a lie. They were tools, not people. Things, not daughters.

Bitterness had grown to hate. It was the one sure emotion she had developed. Quattro had tried to remove her emotions, and it was now a point of fierce pride that Quattro had failed. The fourth Number did not control her. Other emotions flitted through her conciousness now and then, fleeting, ephemeral, and though she cherished them she could not hold onto them. In the long, silent hours she had only her hate to comfort her.

It had proved more than up to the challenge. Did she hate Quattro? With certainity. Quattro had tried to kill her, tried to kill Tre, tried to kill Uno. Sette knew it hadn't been because Quattro really wanted Fate dead; Fate was a convenient excuse that Jail would accept and approve of. Quattro wanted Tre and Uno dead because they were senior to her and prevented Quattro from direct access to Jail or lording it over the other Combat Cyborgs unopposed.

_I will get out of here, Father._ Did she hate Jail? Did she hate the man who had brought her into the world, raised her, trained her? She did. She hated Jail to the depths of her soul. He was a liar, yes, and despite all his intelligence and saavy she could see that in the end he had been a fool as well. He had badly underestimated the Wolkenritter and the ability of the TSAB's Navy to redeploy enough firepower to destroy the Cradle. That had been the final determinator; Chrono Harlaown had gotten there with the firepower to end it and there was no way he would not take the shot. Harlaown might end up in therapy afterwards if his friends had still been aboard the Cradle, but he would give the order. That made everything Jail had done, all his plans and preparations, fools' errands.

_I will get out of here, Father. And I will ensure you never do._


	2. Uno

I know you're out there people, I can hear you breathing. Type something up about the story so I know if I've screwed up. You may notice our star is a little...vindictive. She got it from her dad.

**Uno  
**She paced. She paced often. There wasn't much room for it, and Uno could barely take two steps before having to turn, but she had settled into the routine long ago. It was the only real activity she was allowed.

She was Jail's biological daughter, nearly his clone. Despite this, she was not the same as him. Jail himself had known there was a danger in creating another him, and while Uno shared his genes she did not share his mental conditioning. It meant little to her; she wasn't aware of the difference because she had never experienced it. To the Bureau pyschologists, however, it meant everything; Uno was, in relative terms, sane.

Like Jail she wasn't ever going to win any accolades for her personality. Uno was quite aware that Quattro had tried to kill her to get her out of the way. In fact, the senior Combat Cyborg didn't even consider any other reason for why Quattro would have done what she did. Testarossa was too far away from the Cradle to reach it before it had gotten too high for a flight mage to reach without oxygen assist. Testarossa had posed absolutely no threat to the greater plan.

No, Quattro had known of Uno's suspicions about her lack of sanity and general untrustworthiness, and given the chance had attempted to eliminate her elder sister. It was a blatant, naked power grab. Uno wasn't terribly surprised by that. Nor was she surprised that Jail had allowed it to proceed. Of all the Combat Cyborgs she knew best what their father was truly like. She was his flesh and blood after all.

That did _not_ mean she was okay with it. The Engineer's Revenge Jail had spoken of so grandly had an engineer of its own. Some of the other Combat Cyborgs had been extranous to the plan, certainly, but not her. She was indispensible to Jail achieving _any_ level of success, her skills allowing her to keep tabs on what the Bureau knew and suspected about him, about what his benefactors were thinking of him. Without her, Due's infiltration would have been impossible, the Relics untrackable.

The engineer of the Engineer's Revenge was more than willing to get a little revenge of her own when the time came, as she knew it must. Jail had a plan for this occurance too. It was merely a waiting game.

The Bureau had assumed her behavior the result of loyalty or general intractableness. They had been right, partially. The truth was she _had_ been feeling rather vindictive when she was taken into custody, particularly over the rather…uncouth interrogation technique that had been used first. It was a personality trait entirely descended from Jail.

But now she waited. Like Jail, she was quite aware of the value of timing. Unlike him, she had carefully considered all the variables. Admittedly, because there were far fewer with only two opponents to fight as opposed to the entire Bureau. To Uno however that was merely proof that she was right; she knew how to pick her battles.

Uno knew everything there was to know about Jail's networks, his hidden bases, his other benefactors besides the high council, his infiltration of the Bureau hierarchy. It was information that even the Bureau would gladly have killed for. She had every intention of making use of it. But not immeditately, eventually.

Despite all that she knew, Uno was not privy to the details of every contingency plan Jail had, only aware of their existence. A random stab in the back would serve no purpose. It would be a mere inconvenience, not a threat. Jail and Quattro would find out about the old bases and people being compromised and not go to them, if Uno just went and told the Bureau everything now. Uno wanted to make sure she _hurt_ Jail and Quattro. By waiting, she could bring their world down around them.

So she bided her time. Either Quattro in her infinite maliciousness would find a way out of this prison, or Jail would tire of his cell and set his plans in motion. In the meantime Uno had done her best to convince them both she bore them no ill-will. Her communications with them were all written-form and screened, everything paraphrased by a rotating censorship officer to prevent coded communications being passed, so how successful she was she could not entirely know. Still she was fairly sure it had worked.

So she waited patiently, a knife with blackened blade held high over its unsuspecting victims. Uno quite enjoyed that imagery. She would have enjoyed literally stabbing the two in the back as well, but knew that this was her only recourse.

Unless the Bureau let her enlist after one or the other escaped. That would be very satisifying. One more thought to hold close while she counted down the days, waiting for her chance to strike.


	3. Quattro

The most difficult portion to write. I've long maintained Quattro is a pyschopath. I'm not really equipped to crawl into a pyschopath's head and transcribe what I find without serious effort, something which I'm thankful for. (And if I got it wrong, this is the only time I'll ask that you not let me know.)

**Quattro  
**Damn them all.

Takamachi, her halfwitted daughter, Testarossa, the Wolkenritter, Yagami, her own sisters who had the gall to betray their father and her. May they all die in screaming agony.

The Forwards were not included because Quattro did not believe a word of the official record about their participation in the final battle. They were utterly beneath her notice and could not have played the role assigned them by the Bureau in offical records.

She, they, had been _so close_. A world unfettered by petty morality, free to do as she willed. A world where the common people rightfully served their masters and no knowledge was forbidden, no matter how it was obtained.

It still excited her, to have been on the cusp of the new age, but it was terribly bittersweet now. It almost brought her to tears to think about it. She did not cry only because she would not give those she knew must be watching the satisifaction.

In truth, no one was watching. Quattro was kept in absolute solitary, only written communications, no surveillance, no holographic interaction, no visits from prison staff unless she was unconcious. The Bureau had long since assessed her as completely pyschopathic and very smart. Her chance of rehabilitation was less than zero, and those who had done the assessment had noted that she was so adept at manipulation there was a real risk she might manage to convert others to her viewpoint with regular contact.

Quattro was hardly bothered by the loneliness of it. What did bother her was the time she was losing here. She knew the Doctor must have a plan for this as well, had he not yet used it?

Had he left her behind? Forgotten her? The Bureau jailers wouldn't have told her that. It was a possibly to horrify even her, that she had been discarded as useless like so many others.

She shivered. No, she told herself. No! I am not useless. I am not!

_They_ were useless. They did not understand. They did not appreciate it, the grand vision of the Doctor. Why couldn't they see? Why did they keep fighting those who were so clearly their superior?

She would get out of this place and her wrath would be terrible. She would have new sisters, better sisters. She would be at the side of the Doctor again.

Quattro longed for something to write down her thoughts on, to plan and prepare, but she only had the computer, and that was monitored. She had tried to hack it, but it hadn't worked; without her I.S. and with most of her specialized cybernetics switched off, she wasn't a match for the safeguards. And just to bring the point home, they'd let her succeed once.

The computer she had access to was only for her cell and had no outside connections to anything. It was physically disconnected. They must sometimes connect it to something else so that her messages could be passed on, Quattro guessed while she was asleep. But the only thing she could find out about that computer was that it was even more heavily secured.

Quattro felt she was being mocked.

Damn them all. They were all going to pay for this and everything else.


	4. Tre

I actually finished this before Quattro's. This is the last one. I don't really feel like poking around inside Jail's head. Quattro was hard enough; Jail is not only crazy but acting under at least a few compulsions. I can write what he does, but not how he thinks.

**Tre**

Solitary confinement breeds apathy usually. There were no visiting hours aboard an Orbital Penal Complex, and precious little exercise. The Bureau had not _intended_to make the place soul-destroyingly lonely and boring, but once you accepted the premise that some people were too dangerous to be allowed near other people it was hard to avoid the soul-destroying bit.

Tre wasn't like the others, not really. The simple reason for this was that she had been created to lead the Numbers. She couldn't afford quirks or pyschological problems, nor could she afford to be as coldly rational as Uno. She had to be both smart enough to lead and someone worth following.

She also had to be loyal to Jail, who most rational people would regard as a madman. It presented a paradox Jail had only solved by insulating her and the other Numbers from the outside world almost completely. And even at this level of remove, locked in a cell aboard an Orbital Penal Complex, that isolation was a thing of the past.

Tre had a desk, unlike the other Combat Cyborgs here. She also had a collection of hardcopy books, a shocking anachronism for anyone with even the slightest amount of magical power. She had both these things, and a larger room, because unlike the other Combat Cyborgs here she continued to speak with her jailers. So did Sette, but Sette never asked for anything.

The collection was small, relatively focused; morality and philosophy. Her favorite was a lovingly cared-for copy of Olivie's _On Evil_, the first work of the woman who would later become the Sankt Kaiser. It was not an original, but that was because originals were rare and ridiculously valueable. Where Cinque had gotten even a second-printing copy was a great mystery to Tre.

_On Evil_was the main document of the Saint Church, the foundation of their doctrine that evil was foremost to deprive. It was not a coincidental choice for a woman who had never had a chance at normal life. Tre understood that some of her sisters had gone into the Saint Church and she well understood that choice. But it was not hers.

She could have left. It would have been a simple matter, taken three weeks maybe. Tre was here because in the end, she believed she ought to be here. After all her readings, she kept thinking back to the mages she had killed while serving Jail.

She could not remember their faces.

That should not, she supposed, surprise her. It hadn't mattered to her the first few times. And then later, in mass combat, with so many, why should she? There were over a hundred. She had no time for memory then.

But she _should_. It wasn't right to kill them and not remember. She did remember, sort of. She could remember the battles, the way her body moved, the sensations she felt with perfectly clarity. But she couldn't remember their faces.

It never occurred to her as she lay on her bunk and looked up at the bare metal ceiling that she was wrestling with something most soldiers never had the luxury of considering. Had it, it might also have occurred to her that she was fighting the apathy and loneliness of her condition the only way she could, by introducing greater problems that occupied her attention. It might also have occurred to her that not being able to remember the faces of those she had killed might be a delibrate psychological defense mechanism.

Did she bear Jail and Quattro any ill-will over how she had ended up here? No, not really. There was a mild enmity towards Quattro, but it had much more to do with the post-incarceration realization that the slightly junior Number was a power-mad maniac than anything Quattro had actually done. She might be equipped to make grand moral judgements on Jail's crusade, but as a soldier that was not her job. Particularly since there was a slim chance Jail might one day call upon her again. Or an even slimmer one the Bureau would. She would only judge those things that passed in front of her for that reason.

The Doctor had always done his best to be a loving father, but the last year of incarceration had shown to her that he had not been a good one. All the little gestures of affection were absent from her life, but her life was not terribly different. She often wrote to Cinque, and even the cursory descriptions of Genya Nakajima let her know that as fathers went, Jail had not been a good one. Loving, but not good. She was also aware things could have, and perhaps should have, been much worse.

While her earlier actions on the battlefield were the cause of much of her discomfort, a part of her longed to fight again. It was who she was, what she did. Who for did not concern her greatly.

Just so long as she could get out of here and away from her ghosts.

* * *

"Tre?"

She looked up. It took a great deal of her control not to simply reach out and touch the man, just to feel he was real, not a hallucination. She understood that you only saw a person when injured or sick, and she had never been either. It was holographs all the rest of the time and she had not seen a real person in more than a year. He wore the uniform of a Navy mage, the black longcoat. Tre was instantly able to identify his ancestory as neither Midchildan nor Belkan, too dark a skin tone.

The need for control evaporated when she saw who followed him. Signum. Testarossa had eliminated Tre from battle with ridiculous ease. Signum had long since proved she could beat up on Testarossa with ridiculous ease, so it did not take much imagination to conclude that an ill-considered action would end with someone having to hose the cell down to clean up Tre's blood.

Tre stood slowly, careful not to look like a threat. "What do you want?"


	5. Dieci

When I said I was done with this story, I lied. This ties in directly with the fourth chapter of _In The Service_ and takes place concurrently. Oh, and enjoy the stock fandom interpretation of Shari as a complete technofiend while it lasts. It's the only stock fandom interpretation you're likely to ever get out of me.

**Dieci  
**She was not often called on to fill her original role, the one she still thought of as her "design" role, that of sniper. The Bureau rarely had need of her raw destructive power, and in truth she was more useful on the streets. Like all the Combat Cyborgs, Dieci could sprint very fast and break brick walls with her hands, and that was more than enough for law enforcement. The Bureau had other, more precise snipers when necessary.

But when it came to killing hard targets, she was the best sniper in the Bureau's arsenal. That just wasn't something they had ever needed before. It was with some trepidation she picked up her weapon. The Bureau had built a new one for her, the original having been blown to bits along with the Saint's Cradle. Deici recalled Shari pointing out the six new cartridge slots and stating with rather unconcealed glee that if all fired together, she could make a noticible dent in starship wards. Deici sincerely hoped that wasn't true. She didn't really want the power to be leveling city blocks.

Dieci shook it off. She had a job to do.

* * *

Pairing with Wendi was an exercise in testing Dieci's patience. Fortunately, she had that in surplus. Ever since being released from detention, she had immersed herself in the marksmanship traditions of nearly every world the Bureau had come in contact with. The key point of a sniper's existence was waiting patiently for the perfect shot. Despite inane commentary from her sister.

"Target." Dieci said tonelessly. Then: "…Vita?" The tenth Number had met the Wolkenritter a few times. She actually rather liked the youngest of them. Openness and enthusaism might be completely alien concepts to her, but that did not mean she did not appreciate them, at least in moderation. Vita knew when it was time to be serious again, whereas Wendi was apparently incapable of such recognition.

Dieci was unsure of her task suddenly. "Wendi?"

"Father said this was right. She doesn't look the same…" Wendi replied uncertainly.

Dieci noted a lack of the rather lavish hat and a Barrier Jacket shorn of all embellishments, a single deep red color with no designs on it and none of the black lace fringing on Vita's normal Barrier Jacket. She vaguely recalled something about the hat having been a personal gift from Hayate, and considering how closely Vita identified with Hayate not wearing it was sign something was severely wrong. And there was blood on Graf Eisen. Far too much blood, and some other things. Bone, bits of brain matter. Vita's disdain for killing was well-known.

Mercy kill, then. Hard target, perhaps the hardest she'd ever fired at. "Full Drive." Dieci murmured.

Wendi's head jerked left as she heard the cartridges start firing. Moments later Dieci had wiped the Vita clone from existence, not realizing it was a clone at all.

Dieci summoned a holowindow to her adoptive father and dispassionately informed him of what had just occurred: "Target negated."

* * *

Dieci moped. There really wasn't another word for it, though her sisters tried out plenty during the next forty-eight hours. Well, most of them. Wendi professed to be unable to tell a difference. She continued moping right up until she ran into Vita.

At that point, the tenth Number simply stared as if she'd seen a ghost. Vita stared back, confused for a moment, and then got it. "Oh, you took down the other me." That didn't trigger a response. "Yes, there's two of me now. You're not allowed to panic about it, you killed one of them." The youngest Wolkenritter adopted an expression of total confusion as Dieci hugged her.

After that incident Dieci grew much more open. Better to let people know how she felt about them while she still had the chance.

Not that doing so improved her relationship with Wendi any.


	6. Cinque

I like Cinque. Why? She fought Subaru in the full expectation doing so would kill her. Words cannot express the respect I have for that degree of dedication (believe me, I just wasted 15 minutes trying), even if it was grossly wasted on someone like Jail. Like the last chapter, this is contemporary with chapter four of _In The Service_.  
Also note the fanwank at why Nanoha and Fate aren't a mass of scar tissue yet.

**Cinque  
**How does one face death? It seems like a very important question, but it is disingenuous. By the time you actually get around to facing death, it is usually too late to control your reaction to it. Cinque had already faced death twice, once in the form of Zest, the second time personified by someone she now considered a sister and dear friend. It had been an interesting experience. Believing she was utterly doomed, she had found calm. It was inevitable and there was no sense in getting upset about dying. It was Cinque's firm belief that her calm had saved her. Things had seemed so logical, so easy, then.

That calm hovered at the edge of her conciousness now as they chased a Zafira clone through the city. Cinque wished she could give some of it to Subaru, who seemed to be barely holding it together. It was probably worse for Subaru, on reflection, as she had actually seen Wolkenritter in action. Wendi even used recordings of a yelling Vita to freak Subaru out as a prank once.

The joke seemed decidedly less funny now that they had been actually been yelled at by a Wolkenritter.

The actual chasing was mostly being done by a small mob of Air Force mages, who were under orders to stay the hell away from their target. Fighting Zafira from a distance was the only way a normal mage _could_ fight him. Anything else devolved into less fighting and more dying horribly. This was something that had already been proved.

Fortunately Cinque and Subaru were not normal. They were Combat Cyborgs, faster and tougher than a normal mage. So was Zafira, though. The last of the Belkan Guardian Beasts was…Cinque shuddered and recalled reading an account of the Wolkenritter attacking a village back during the bad old days before Hayate. If that was happening all over again, then the streets would run red. They _had_ to be enough to stop this psychotic Zafira. The alternative was too terrible to contemplate.

Cinque gestured Subaru to lead for a moment, adjusting her grip on the knife in her hand. She was surprised to discover she was sweating. It was odd to her; she never really _felt_ fear, and at times suspected the Doctor had made her incapable of it. But her body _reacted_ as though afraid. Then Subaru yelled and it was past time for thought.

Cinque charged into the room behind Subaru as the Type 0 ducked a punch and slammed Revolver Knuckle into the Wolkenritter's midsection. Zafira stumbled back a step. He was not hurt; it would take more than that to do it. Still, Subaru could knock someone from their feet with a punch, and no matter how many other physical laws a mage trampled mass and velocity delivered by a blunt instrument could not be completely nullified. The fact Zafira was still standing after getting hit by Revolver Knuckle was impressive enough.

The rejoinder was a kick in the stomach that swept Subaru slighty to one side. That was fine with Cinque as it cleared her target. She threw her knife at Zafira, followed up with several more. This wasn't your typical mage, Cinque reminded herself. He would have to be worn down.

After about a minute of back-and-forth it was becoming clear that the match was roughly even. Subaru had twice used her I.S. on Zafira, but as a being of condensed magic Vibration Shatter just wasn't very effective. The wolfman wouldn't stand still long enough for something that took longer to set up, like a Divine Buster, nor could Subaru afford to leave one hand busy that long when she would probably need it to fend off Zafira.

Cinque's own knives did better relatively speaking. Rumble Detonator's shotgun approach to damage, with solid shrapnel, blast effect, and magic, made sure she would be effective against any target. The problem for her was that as a hand-to-hand combatant she left a lot to be desired, lacking both height and reach. Subaru had to do most of the heavy lifting. If Ginga had been here instead, the fight might already be over. And every time Cinque had to pull back to get out another knife Subaru got more beat-up.

"Hmmph." Zafira appeared to be considering them with a bit of amusement. "You're not bad. Pity I'm better."

The hows and whys of it would forever escape Cinque, but somehow the blow sailed clean past Subaru's effort to block it and knocked her cold, snapping her head around with a worrisome cracking noise. At that same moment, Nove charged in. Cinque hadn't really understood Subaru's reaction to Ginga being taken before, but she got it now. "Nove, get Subaru to safety."

"But-" Nove began.

"_Do it._" Cinque understood it now. She threw herself at the wolfman in a flurry of blows and stabs and detonating knives. Height and reach didn't matter to her anymore. She was going to take Zafira down or die in the attempt.

In the end, it was a die in the attempt. She hurt. She couldn't stand properly. The wolfman regarded her with unmistakeable respect, but the gesture was utterly wasted. "You fought well. Last words?" the clone said to her.

The wall beside her, Cinque noticed, was metal. That calm, that abominable knowledge that she was surely about to die, flowed through her. Everything became clear. A smile at the wolfman and then she slapped her hand into the wall. "Rumble Detonator."

* * *

She floated, without sensation of weight or gravity. There was no pain. Everything was purest white. Cinque wondered a moment if she was dead, but rejected that. She didn't think she particularly merited the Belkan heaven yet.

Reality, harsh and cold, flooded back into her brain. The ceiling, or at least she assumed it was a ceiling as her ears were ringing and she could not seem to tell which way was up, was pitted and scorched. Everything hurt as though exposed to a live flame. Cinque tried to scream in agony, but it wouldn't come out. Even breathing was torture.

She couldn't feel her left hand.

Trying to move produced Subaru, Nove, and what looked like a Ground Forces medic entering her field of vision. She couldn't hear the words, but she could read the lips, a useful skill the Doctor had imparted to all his daughters. "Don't move," and "Relax." That seemed like good advice at the moment, so Cinque followed it. A pricking in her left shoulder, which she noted because it actually hurt less than everything else. The pain rapidly started to abate.

Warm blackness engulfed her, and she greeted it with a relieved sigh.

* * *

"How is Cinque?" Hayate asked of Shamal. It had not been Hayate's suggestion that had seen Shamal placed in charge of the Combat Cyborg's care. The Knight of the Lake had walked into the hospital and taken it up over the objections of a half-dozen Bureau doctors, and nobody dared get in her way after she had portaled someone onto the roof for trying.

The Nakajima family crowded around to hear the news. It had been 96 hours since the attack now. Shamal politely pretended not to notice how crowded her personal space had become. "Her left hand is a total loss. Shari and I both tried but there's just not enough there to put it back together." Shamal stopped the Nakajimas from commenting by talking over them. "Subaru, Nove, you saved her life with that shield, otherwise she would all be like that. The shrapnel was all slowed down so it failed to penetrate most of her cyborg enhancements. The rest is just cosmetic and easily enough fixed. As for a complete recovery: If she were a human there would be nothing we could do. We can clone skin and muscles easily enough to repair burns or penetration wounds but something as complex as a complete hand or eye is beyond us. Fortunately, however, she is a Combat Cyborg. Shari believes she can create a duplicate of the cyborg parts and cloning the remaining tissue is well within the realm of possiblity. Cinque should be back to normal in, at worst case, three months."

Genya ran his hands over his face and sighed.


	7. Nove

While not corresponding to a particular chapter of _In The Service_, this and a forthcoming chapter about Sein can probably be considered a prequel to the ninth chapter, _Don't Wake Me_. It would be fair to assume that Sound Stage X is occurring in the background, with minor cosmetic differences; Hayate's "dream team" of the Bureau's most powerful mages can be assumed to fill in the roles of anyone I borrow for _A Numbered Existence_. The Combat Cyborgs have also greatly enhanced their standing with the Bureau; retroactively their first official mission can be considered the Other-Wolkenritter's attack on Cranagan, not the Marine Garden fire.  
I've gone with a "sarcastic, angry Subaru" interpretation of Nove, basically as she was in the show and _Soundstage X_. We're still far chronologically ahead of her appearances in _ViVid_ and _Force_ so I think it works.

**Nove  
**The Infinite Library, like many libraries that dealt in subjects of power, had restrictions on some things. Many of these were things that dealt with mass weapons; the Bureau might reject their use, but it had active programs in research and development to make sure it kept a generation or two ahead of any Non-Administrated World. Others dealt with subjects the Bureau regarded as ethically problematic; the use of magic for brainwashing and torture. Then there was Special Restricted Access.

Even the librarians were not allowed in Special Restricted Access without an armed escort. The knowledge kept here was not guarded to preserve the balance of power, but because it was actively dangerous to the knower. Belka had explored every possible concept of warfare, and in their time had discovered things that other cultures considered only nightmares. Books that read in their proper order could brainwash people into performing a certain act a set time period later and images that could cause the viewer to suffer a pyschotic break just by viewing them were the most commonly cited objects stored in Special Restricted Access.

By curious quirk, Jail Scaligetti had worked almost exclusively in Special Restricted Access when he was in his teens. Most people did not consider that coincidence. It did, however, mean that he had extensive experience with the sort of threats kept there. Leaving nothing to chance, and perhaps with thoughts of later weaponizing some of what he had learned, Jail had ensured his daughters were protected against such things.

This meant that they often found themselves there, guarding the librarians who worked in the section. Unlike any other guard assignment, however, their job was to guard the rest of the world from the librarians in the event something went wrong. By the same token, many of those who worked in Special Restricted Access were familars. They were defended against its horrors by their construct nature…though it was rumored some of the things stored there had been specifically designed to effect familars.

Thus it was that Nove and Arf found themselves together, checking a shelf towards the very back of Special Restricted Access. Though the Belkans had developed these books as weapons, they had also seen their use in controlling the flow of information. It was to such rigged books that they had commited the most dangerous knowledge the Belkan Empire had possessed.

Arf was reading from a book that dealt with everything the Belkan Empire had been able to glean about the Book of Darkness. It was a large book, since they had basically taken a shotgun approach to the subject and commited all their working theories and exhaustive accounts of all their contacts with the Book and its masters or servants to paper. Every few pages was a sanity-blasting fractal image. Arf barely registered them as interesting. Nove noticed they gave her a headache if she stared.

"Got it." Arf announced, carefully closing the book again and placing it back on the shelf. Nove was curious as to what the binding material was, as it looked like no other book binding she'd ever seen, but then realized this was a line of thought she probably didn't want to pursue.

"So where do we go?" Nove asked. Arf, like her mistress, had been recalled to active duty following the Other-Wolkenritter's attack on Cranagan; she had after all fought Zafira to a standstill. Unlike Fate, Arf had been assigned along with a number of the Combat Cyborgs to locate this new Book.

In the aftermath of the Ligeia debacle, it became clear that no one had traveled from Midchilda to there, and so they were given a new task: find out how the Other-Wolkenritter had even known to attack Midchilda and Cranagan in the first place. It might well be impossible, but they had put some of the Bureau's better minds on it to back up the field agents.

Unfortunately, the developing Mariage crisis on Mid was getting the attention of a lot of people, so at the moment only Arf and Nove could be spared to chase down a lead. "Non-Administrated World 157." Arf replied.

Nove stared. "You're making it up."

Arf shook her head. "Nope. In the book it goes by the name Rasalhague." To the Bureau at large, it had no actual name. Something had gone horribly wrong on Non-Administrated World #157 in the dim past of the Belkan Empire. To this day, magic did not work correctly there. That was why Nove was essential to any trip there; as a Combat Cyborg she was not dependent on it. She would have preferred, however, to bring a few other people, like say all of her sisters including Ginga and Subaru, and the Combat Cyborgs that had joined the Saint Church too. Rasalhague had an evil reputation. Arf noticed Nove's expression. "Scared?"

"Don't tempt me to have them make a full scan of your head for memetic contagion." Nove shot back.

"Point." Arf conceded. "Do you think we can round up anyone else to go with us on this trip?"

"That depends on how much pull you have with the Saint Church." Nove replied.

* * *

It actually turned out to be a fair amount of pull, but the Saint Church was only willing to part with Otto for the moment. Likewise the Navy had no warships to spare for transport, so a naval courier vessel usually used for personnel transfer would get them there…and land them there. Neither teleportation nor magical flight could be relied upon, so a direct landing was necessary.

For Arf, it was an extremely unnerving experience. It felt like something was nibbling at the edge of her mind. As a construct, she was too solid a creation to be injured by a simple AMF or unstable background magic; a will of her own protected her from it. That didn't make it pleasant. Nove could feel it as well, though her own magical skill was minimal and she depended on her cybernetics; she was edgy, fidgeting. Otto might have as well, but the boyish, stoic number didn't let on.

Rasalhague had once been a living, vibrant world, as bright and green as any planet ever was. Non-Administrated World #157, however, was in the category the Bureau classed as "habitable; dead", an apparent contradiction borne of the horrors of the Belkan Civil War. It still rained, there were still oceans, mountains, hills and valleys and rivers, and you could still breathe the air. But everything including virii and bacteria had been exterminated. Perhaps it had been planet-wide neutron irradiation, perhaps the infamous Life-Eater Virus, perhaps something else the Bureau had no name for. The phrase _never again _was inscribed into the collective soul of the Time-Space Administrative Bureau, for this was what it had been formed to prevent. Everything else the Bureau had accomplished was just extra.

Nove kicked at the dust and sand beneath her feet, the literal gravedust of the Belkan Empire. This place gave her the creeps. It was the silence; with nothing alive, there were no birds, no animals, no people. The wind presaged only sandstorms. And only half of her normal gear was useful as Jet Edge didn't work except on a reasonably solid surface, making her feel like she was half-naked.

"There are ghosts here." Otto said softly. "Those who died without ever knowing why." The boyish number softly recited a Saint Church prayer for the dead. Nove gave the eighth number a sideways glance and wondered how anyone got religion that fast.

"Less of the creepy." Arf requested seriously. The familiar lead the two Combat Cyborgs towards the only visible structure.

Nove caught up with her before she could enter. "Can't let you go first. Fate would murder me if you got hurt. She has a powerful family, might even get away with it."

"You've never actually met Chrono Harlaown, have you?" Arf asked. Arf often helped watch Chrono's children, so she knew him well. In the foxgirl's opinion, Chrono was likely to be _harsher_ on a family member accused of a serious offence then he would on someone he didn't know.

"Nope. Plan to keep it that way, so stay behind me." Nove replied.

The foyer was expansive, and had once housed impressive statuerary. The marks on the floor where they had been and other signs told the story; an archeological expedition had been by in the year or so. "We appear to be late." Otto opined.

"Give me some credit for research." Arf replied. "We need to go to the lower galleries. They never did. Too dangerous for civvies."

"Why can't we decide it's too dangerous for us too?" Nove asked.

"Because Mid might end up cinders and ash if we don't." Arf replied.

"She makes a convincing argument." Otto had the barest hint of a smirk.

Seeing in the absolute darkness was not a problem for the three. The guiding principle behind the creation of a familiar is that it must be able to protect its master or mistress at any time, under any conditions. The Combat Cyborgs had to incorporate all the abilities of a Device-armed mage, so they too could see in absolute darkness. Better than Arf could, in fact, as Nove raised a hand for a halt and bent down to examine the floor.

_What is it? _Arf asked. Darkness and silence were the norm down here, so it seemed wise to keep both.

Nove tapped her foot. Footprints. The younger Combat Cyborgs were much more dependent on their enhancements then the first round of activations, as their native mage ranks were very weak; most of them might make D on a good day. Even telepathy required a lot of focus, and Nove didn't have the patience to spare.

Arf shifted forms. She sniffed the air. Only the scent of the Combat Cyborgs, metal, a slightly _off _smell of skin, and the faint whiff of ozone from high-energy activity. She put her nose to the ground and started checking that too. Nothing. Only Nove's scent. Only familars could pass without leaving a scent, being a magical construct meant they didn't have any conventional scent to be smelled. Familars, and Wolkenritter.

Arf shifted forms again, and warned her companions. They proceeded, slower and more carefully, for Nove and Otto could not locate a set of footprints that lead out. But they met no one, although the groaning of stressed stone around them made them rather worried several times.

Someone had been here recently, though. The item they had come for was gone.


	8. Sein

Sein can be do ridiculous things, like swim through walls, with a straight face. So that's being played up. Mind she's also not exactly _nice_… I apologize for the shortness of the chapter. The truth is I got hit with a severe case of writer's block related to the lack of much canonical personality beyond "slightly goofy" for Sein, and honestly crackfic isn't my thing.

**Sein  
**Why Sein had joined the Saint Church was usually something of a mystery. It wasn't like her particular skills were of much use to the Church. The Bureau could have easily found her a home as a field operative or intelligence agent, well-paid and respected. Legendary, eventually.

Sein, though, wasn't really interested in that. She wanted to try a simple, uncomplicated life for awhile, and the Saint Church looked like a good way to do it. They did call on her from time to time to help with their own duties. The Saint Church was a state within a state, with its own laws, its own law enforcement, and its own military if you squinted hard at the Orders Militant. Sein wasn't a formal member of any of the organizations within the Church which performed a law enforcement or paramilitary function, but they called on her assistance occasionally. The ability to move through walls is an asset of great value.

Still, Sein had mostly been able to live the life she chose, one of relative leisure and normalcy. She had friends in the Church. She had friends outside the Church. She knew people who had no conception she was a Combat Cyborg. It was…peaceful.

Then somebody had tried to burn down Cranagan using a fake set of Wolkenritter and Sein had found herself seconded to Bureau Intelligence by the Saint Church. The Saint Church was okay with many things other religions would be most upset with, but mass murder wasn't one of them. Bureau Intelligence had given Sein a list of people and where they could be found, and questions for them. Everything else was up to her, so she'd have fun with this. In fact, she had the perfect idea.

* * *

"Who are you?"

"I'm Batman." Sein replied, pitching her voice as low as she could.

The man's blank stare made her sigh. Plebian criminals. Whatever happened to the classy mobster type she saw in the movies? "Nevermind. I'm here to ask you some questions and," she caught his hand and broke a finger for trying to pull a Device, "you should really consider fighting a Combat Cyborg as _stupid_ and just answer."

This wasn't strictly legal, but the Bureau like many governments recognized there were times when you had to bend or break the rules. Sein's instructions had been "Whatever it takes without lethal injury or property damage." The man took a little more convincing, then Sein left him alone, rather enjoying his expression as she dove through the wall.

They started getting smarter after another couple of days. They wouldn't be alone. They'd have weapons out and ready to use in private. It made things more difficult for Sein, but not terribly so. And they started reacting to her as "Batman!" since word was finally getting around. Sein liked that quite a bit.

Take this woman for example. She had a knife-like Storage Device on her desk. It didn't help much, because Sein noticed this and simply rose out of the floor behind her, carefully took hold of the chair, and spun it around. "Boo!"

"Do you have any idea who you're threatening?" the woman asked. _After_she settled back into her seat from trying to jump up and meeting Sein's hands slamming her back down.

Sein shrugged. "Do you have any idea how little I care? Answer the questions and I'm out of your hair."

"And if I don't answer them?"

"Then I lean on you and your operation really hard. Starting with a video," Sein waved her built-in camera finger, "of downstairs going to the Navy. They'd be real interested in what you're doing with the guts of a starship main gun, I'm sure." Actually the Navy was going to find out about that regardless, but there was no reason to tell this woman that. It'd only make her intractable.

"…Fine. Tell me what you want to know. Batman."

A reasonable person. Sein was almost shocked. Almost.

The fact she found out something useful, however, did shock her. She eagerly informed her superiors as soon as she could. The praise she received for a solid lead was quite welcome, and Sein thought she might actually learn to enjoy this intelligence thing.

Especially since she got to be Batman.


	9. Due and Otto

Cracktastic idea for how to incorporate Due is cracktastic; difference from regular Mariage can be assumed to be because she's not the same as the usual material. (Or my screwups in interpreting what I was able to find out about Soundstage X since I don't speak Japanese.) Like the first few chapters, this does not have to be thought of as a parallel to _In The Service _and can be taken as a standalone. If you chose to think of it as a parallel, it takes place at roughly the same time as Gizmos.  
This one's for Nanya, who gave me parts of the idea by her Otto and Zaffy fic. Though I'm not terribly sure Nanya would appreciate this…

**Due and Otto  
**A man once said that death is the ultimate solution to one's problems, for in death they are erased or become the problems of others. He was accorded a wise man in his time, and the saying survived.

He was not as wise as he thought he was.

It was a voice in her head. It told her she had died and she knew it was right because she could remember that. It offered her life anew, life eternal. Glory and war and death. And like so many others, Due forgot to ask what the pricetag was.

And when she awoke, her mind was not her own. Only because she was a cyborg did she even know that something was wrong, but she had urges, urges to kill, slaughter in the name of Ixpellia. She didn't even know who Ixpellia was, and she could barely fight the urges at all. Her body responded to the call as well, weapons and more armor forming somehow. In the end, Due had to rationalize.

She had simply gone insane. None of this was real. The Doctor would fix her soon, she told herself. The alternative was too much for her to take. The logical snapper in the realization that she was insane and none of this was real lurked below that, threatening to plunge her off the deep end at any moment.

* * *

The Marine Garden project was, Otto thought with dry amusement, clearly doomed. The Mariage attacks had driven up the cost of the place's construction tremendously. Now someone was apparently trying to burn it down. The Bureau might get upset she had interfered, but Otto did not consider that worthy of her notice. Her duty was to a higher cause, saving lives, then the law.

She sheparded a group of people away from the flames, and the noises of battle. Some of her sisters were fighting back there, but she was in no rush to go to their aid as long as others need the help more. Then she came to a stop, and stared ahead of her at the form emerging from a cluster of flames.

_"Run."_ Otto told the people behind her.

They didn't ask questions. They ran, and for that Otto was grateful. A line of hard punches to the chest as a mass weapon coughed to life. Otto was grateful she had thought to summon her new Barrier Jacket at the beginning of her lifesaving excursion, or she would likely be dead. She did not stop to consider her options; a mage had many when it came to protecting other people.

A Combat Cyborg had only one. She could not put up a barrier or a shield to protect the people she had been guiding away from the fighting, and she had only one thing that could stop mass weapons fire anyways. Otto charged, determined to block the Mariage's line of fire with her own body. It was all she could do.

More coughing noises. A suppressed weapon? The Mariage had no use for subtlety. She stumbled but stayed upright, stayed moving, despite the force against her chest of multiple hard blows. It aimed well.

She stopped just barely within arm's-length away. Then she took a closer look at her opponent. It couldn't be. She was dead. But Mariage were the dead returned to life… "Sister…what have they done to you?" Otto asked softly.

That appeared to draw some recognition. "Otto?" It didn't sound like Due. It sounded…ground-out, forced. There was something uncontrolled in the tone that Due would never have permitted herself to sound like. She might have felt it, but she would never have shown it.

"Yes, it's Otto. What happened, Due?" Otto did not approach any closer, still cautious. As far as she knew Mariage barely retained their human intelligence, acting more like mad dogs then soldiers. And she'd never heard of one reacting to people from it's previous life or retaining memories thereof.

This close in she could see that it had changed Due. She was taller, one of the reasons Otto hadn't immediately identified the second Number. No clothes. Lines of metal visible in her skin, a mass weapon, a projectile-thrower, slung under each arm. One looked larger than the other, but where the ammunition was coming from was a mystery to Otto. And the claws, the claws Due had so liked.

Otto wondered a moment why she was even talking. Due had as surely been a monster in life as she was now. _No_, she told herself. _Everyone deserves a chance. Everyone._

But in talking to her, she had irrevocably cost Due her chance.

In talking to Due, in acknowledging her by name, Otto had proved to Due that this was all real. Confronted with the knowledge that she was not insane, that this was really happening to her, Due snapped. The breakdown, the momentary loss of sense of self, would not have mattered in any other situation. But the howling maelstrom of the Mariage's urges rushed into fill the gap and ended Due as a separate entity.

The arm came up and there was thunder and powerful blows against Otto's chest accompanied by flashes of light. She nearly fell over, stumbling back six or more paces while her brain tried to figure out what was going on. _Explosive shells._ She went down on one knee to maintain her balance, flinching from the light of it as one hit her in the face but failed to do harm; even where a Barrier Jacket did not show a physical presence it still protected.

"Don't make me do this, sister!" Otto shouted, but she could barely hear herself over the shells exploding against her Barrier Jacket. She struggled to her feet, managed to orient herself despite the series of what felt like murderously hard punches. "I am sorry, sister. I.S." the boyish Number murmured. _"Ray Storm!" _That was much louder.

Now it was the Due-Mariage's turn to stagger back. After the smoke cleared, though, it was still standing, still there. Otto couldn't believe it. Ray Storm had more than enough power to deal with a Mariage, _or_ with Due. Was she just out of practice?

Not the time to consider that question. Both arms coming up now, and she registered the flash from under both at about the same time it felt like someone had just rammed a truck into her. Both guns was too much; Otto couldn't stay upright, and after she fell she tried twice to struggle back to her feet and failed under the force of the barrage.

Otto might not be able to stand, but she could crawl. So she crawled away, trying to lead the Mariage away from the direction the people she had been escorting had gone. It wasn't going well, and she expected to momentarily feel those claws pierce her back.

It took her several seconds to realize that the loud crash she had just heard was not related, and that she was not getting hit anymore. The eighth Number wasted no time getting up and looking around. A nearby building was sporting a new hole, and Otto circled for a better look. No one would have blamed her if she just ran, but she did the brave rather than the sane thing. If the Mariage had lost interest, she would get its attention and lead it on a merry chase through Marine Garden to buy time for someone with more firepower to show up.

The Mariage had not lost interest. Instead it had found problems of its own, embodied in a well-built man with grey hair and grey wolf ears. Unless Otto was going crazy, that was Zafira. The Wolkenritter had not been called out to deal with the Mariage problem mainly because it seemed like gross overkill to do so. Evidently the fire had changed someone's mind. Or, like Otto, the wolfman had found it impossible to sit out when in the neighborhood.

The wolfman fought with a smooth assurance Otto could only marvel at. There was no fear, only certainty and precision. She watched as he effortlessly ducked or twisted aside from raking strikes of Due's claws, unmarked despite the best efforts of the cyborg-slash-Mariage. Otto, something of a strategist herself, was deeply impressed by the control and attention to detail. To her there was something almost poetic about it, like some grand work of art, every flick of an ear and twitch of a muscle full of purpose and power.

And the Doctor had thought his cyborgs would be a match for this degree of skill, this utter mastery. Jail Scaligetti really was crazy, Otto mused. A few moments later, it was all over.

"Are you all right?" Zafira's voice asked, slightly gruff, but warm at the same time.

"Fine." Otto replied calmly. But she didn't feel calm. _I think I might be in love._


	10. Wendi

Like the last, not necessarily connected to anything…well, except for the last one. Writing a story for Wendi resulted in a bit of the usual styling being abandoned to try and better capture how she thinks.  
If somebody has a clue as to what to do with Deed, _please tell me._ I don't.

**Wendi**  
Letter-writing wasn't Wendi's idea of fun. Of course her idea of fun was generally a bit skewed considering her upgringing, often involving explosions and property damage, but still. She'd also recently taken an interest in the opposite sex, but…well, normal boys were _fragile_. She was a Combat Cyborg, and with her enhanced strength even kissing someone like she meant it would break their jaw.

Not that she'd broken any jaws yet. Wendi just didn't want to get a reputation as the _worst kisser ever_.

In any case, her regular letters back and forth with Sette had recently been interrupted. She had taken up the hobby on the suggestion of Cinque, and continued it because Cinque had threatened her at knifepoint. Unbeknownst to Cinque, the suggestion had _really_ come from Tre, who wanted Sette to connect with someone besides Tre herself.

So Wendi tried sending a letter to Uno. And one to Tre too, just to make sure. Wendi wasn't particularly in a mood to write to Quattro. The others all seemed to think Quattro was utterly nuts but Wendi mainly remembered Quattro was boring and cutesy, the combination of things she could least stand.

That done, she could turn her attention to other things, like…actually she wasn't sure. Maybe go harass Otto about trying to date Zafira now. Wendi had to admit a certain grudging respect for the boyish Number's solution to the problem of breaking people by accident: find somebody who she couldn't break.

Wendi considered the lack of male cyborgs, or male Wolkenritter. Then she considered why there were no male cyborgs for a bit and came to the conclusion that the doctor was a bit of a perv. Maybe a lot of a perv, but Wendi decided to be generous and assume Jail _wasn't_ creating a harem. Probably. She couldn't really picture Tre and Uno going along with that.

* * *

So another day, another run at playing beat cop, then home to Combat Cyborg Central, sometimes refered to as the Nakajima residence. The crime rate in Cranagan was the lowest anywhere in space the Bureau had even visited. Too many mages to be a criminal on Mid: the odds a random bystander would hit you with a bind in the middle of a crime were far too high for anyone sane to accept. Maybe she should get a transfer, Wendi thought. Someplace with action.

Or nightlife that didn't card her. That'd be fun! Messy, but… Wendi shook it off. That thought was so incredibly doomed. It could only end horribly. Granted it'd be great fun while it was going on but the words Orbital Penal Complex figured prominently in how it ended up. The Bureau kept the Combat Cyborgs on a short leash, which wasn't unusual in their treatment of people whose lethality could be measured in necks snapped a second.

The number was ten, for the record. Wendi often wondered if it was blanket to all her sisters, or only applied to just her. She also wondered how it had been arrived at. Certainly not by empirical testing, she'd never snapped a neck in her life. Yes she knew how, all her sisters did too, but that wasn't the point!

Honestly, Wendi felt a little useless. She barely even got to help old ladies across the street on Mid, since about three fourths of them could just float because they knew flight magic. She needed something to sink her teeth into, and then maybe shake it around like a terrier with a small furry animal. In constructing that metaphor she didn't realize terriers did that to snap the small furry animal's neck.

Which probably explained a lot about why the Bureau rated her at ten necks snapped a second.

Subaru and Cinque were actually playing a boardgame, with a real board and pieces and dice and everything, like they were some kind of _barbarians_ who had never seen electronics before. Cinque actually liked it for that very comparison. Dieci appeared from elsewhere in the house and glanced around.

"Dieci-" Wendi began.

"No. Absolutely not." The tenth Number put on a coat and looked for her shoes.

"You have no idea what I was going to say!" Wendi protested.

"Irrevelant. I have places to be." Dieci replied, having located her shoes and started to put them on. "Sniper school for small-calibur weapons."

"Vice is your instructor?" Subaru asked from her game.

Dieci appeared momentarily confused by the interjection. Granscenic's first name could do that. "Yes."

"You're never going to get a date with this job fixation." Wendi muttered.

Dieci paused in the doorway. "Perhaps I already have. After all, would I tell _you_?" Then she was gone before Wendi could reply.

"You know," Cinque said conversationally, "she's right. She wouldn't tell us."

"Even me?" Wendi asked.

Cinque grinned a surprisingly rakish grin for somebody in the body of child, probably helped by her eyepatch. "_Especially_ you, Wendi." The fifth Number then dove sideways out of her chair to dodge a couch cushion thrown at her.

The cushion landed on the table Cinque had been sitting at and knocked the gamepieces and dice everywhere. Subaru looked up at Wendi with murder in her eyes. Wendi jumped the couch and ran for the stairs. "Oh crap oh crap oh crap-" She collided with Nove who was just coming down the stairs, and they collided with Subaru, resulting in an uncomfortably posistioned pile of cyborgs at the bottom of the stairs.

Genya Nakajima poked his head out of the kitchen and then shook it. Just another day in the life of the Nakajimas.


	11. Deed

I apologize for the shortness, but, well, how much can you really squeeze out of this sort of thing? It also feels, thematically, like a good place to end a cycle of stories about the Numbers.

**Deed**  
"Deed!" The Combat Cyborg ignored Schach's call. The Sister would find her soon enough anyways. Deed was right; Schach came around the corner moments later. "Deed, Knight Carim tells me that you intend to leave the Church."

A nod. "I do, Sister."

Schach shook her head. "Deed, you know you cannot do that. The terms of your parole forbid it."

"The terms of my parole are not as immutable as the words of the Sankt Kaiser, Sister." Deed replied. "My sisters have proved their loyalty and worth. We have shown we are not monsters, and may be trusted. I have spoken with the necessary people, and as long as I do not attempt to go to a Non-Adminstrated World and inform the authorities of my comings and goings, I may travel where I wish."

"Why leave the Church, though?" Schach asked. It was, to her, an act just barely comprehensible. The Saint Church was her way of thinking, her way of acting, her life and her only love. For Schach Nouera to leave the Church would be like cutting out her heart. What she did, thought, _was_, all of that would cease to exist.

"Why stay?" Deed countered, then she summoned an uncharacteristic smile for her mentor to soften the blow she knew those words would be to Schach. "The Church was a transition, a stepping stone. The Church was my cradle, while I learned what it is to live with normal people in normal ways. It was an excellent cradle, Sister Schach, and I doubt I could have been taught as well as I have been here anywhere else. The Church has been good to me, and I will not forget that. Or you."

Deed gestured to the night sky above, a sweeping, expansive movement of her arms. "So many points of light, so many lives to be lived. I have to leave my cradle, Sister. I have to see what life is like outside it. Maybe I will come back some day. Maybe I will not. Regardless, I think you for having been here to teach me."

Schach nodded. It was not an unfamilar thing to hear those who had grown up in the Saint Church say. True, Deed and her sisters had not actually been raised in the Church literally, but in a very real sense it was where they had grown to maturity. Some, like Sein, could satisify their desire to go places and meet people within the confines of special work for the Church, but not everyone was so well-posistioned. While the Church was everything to Schach, she was not so intolerant as to see it as everything to everyone. There were other needs and other wants in life.

That left her with just one question. "Where will you go, Deed?"

The Combat Cyborg looked up to the night sky. "I don't know, Sister Schach. But I look forward to finding out."


	12. Uno and Quattro: Family Reunion 1

This ties in directly with Chapter 13 of _In The Service_ and describes, sort of, events taking place therein. But it's really set sometime during Chapter 14.

**Uno and Quattro: Family Reunion 1  
**"Quattro."

The last loyal Number raised her head, knowing the voice and the vaguely disapproving tone. "Uno. What do they think they will gain by bringing you here?"

Uno inclined her head slightly to the left, but she did not sit to match her sister, instead leaning with her back against a wall. "I asked to see you, Quattro. Considering the security they habitually place around you, I am admittedly surprised I was allowed to."

Quattro laughed bitterly. "A welcome-back party from my fellow inmates? Touching."

_She doesn't know_, Uno thought. _She really doesn't know. And I am going to have fun with this. _"You are taking this rather personally. Last time you took your imprisonment in stride. Is there perhaps something you need to talk about?" Quattro would never talk about what was bothering her. She was a full-blown psychopath and incapable of trusting someone with her innermost thoughts. Only by coercion would Quattro ever share what she _really_ thought. "Where did the scar on your neck come from?"

"Tre!" Quattro spat. Well, coercion or outrage. "That...traitor! She was there. She actually _fought _to keep me from saving the Doctor." They all called him "the Doctor" to his face, but of the elder sisters only Quattro would never refer to Jail as "Father". Uno was fairly sure she knew exactly why that was so: Quattro was equally incapable of a normal father-daughter relationship. She followed Jail for very different reasons from the others.

"You never did like Tre." Uno commiserated. The simple reason for that was that Tre didn't at all appreciate Quattro's efforts to impose her will on the younger set of cyborgs, and Tre had spent a full ten minutes ranting at Jail himself over how Sette had turned out. "And she never did like you. Still, I am surprised she could _find_ you. Silver Curtain."

"Tre is not as stupid as she looks. Chose the battlefield. Shape the battle." Quattro relied. "And my cybernetics were not being…reliable."

"Poor maintaince? I understand you were roughing it on a non-magical world…" Uno inquired. She knew _exactly _why Quattro's cybernetics hadn't worked well.

Quattro deflected the question. "Yes, we were. And we received little news there. Tell me, is the return of Ix true?"

Uno nodded. "Though her real name is Ixpellia." A tiny detail, but one that Quattro would enjoy knowing when she had not previously. _So like Father_, Uno thought, _so very like him. Even as his clone, I do not share his thought processes nearly as closely as she does. But neither of them could ever use that knowledge; too egotistical, too outright __narcissistic__ to stand the comparison. They must believe they are special little butterflies_. Contempt came so easily to her, and in any other situation might have worried Uno. "Yes, she returned, with her Mariage, after a fashion. In fact, someone was using her and the Mariage for their own ends. The Bureau as much rescued as it did apprehend her." Uno had chosen her words carefully. Nobody had actually _arrested _Ixpellia, mainly because Ixpellia hadn't actually done anything _wrong _herself. Uno didn't ever _lie _to her sisters, even Quattro. She just didn't tell them the whole truth.

"A pity…she would have been a marvelous test subject." Quattro's voice betrayed a momentary jealousy. She would have liked to have had Ixpellia and used her just as Runessa had, but Quattro would have done it for the Doctor. Uno fought very hard to avoid shaking her head at Quattro's inability to adapt to the environment in which the Bureau existed. For Uno, obeying most of the strictures of normal morality remained a matter of practicality rather than true belief, but she could well comprehend the value of major tenants like not killing, stealing, or driving into oncoming traffic. They were simple, commonsense conclusions intended to preserve order by making sure people had something to lose.

In that conclusion she could also see why the Jailocracy would have failed even if Jail had taken steps to account for the Bureau's Navy or the many other Administrated Worlds reacting to him. Under the Glorious Scientific Republic of Jail and Quattro Scaligetti and the massive upheaval that would have attended it, far too many people would have concluded they had nothing left to lose. It did not require armies to unseat a power based on the rule of one man. It took only a single person with the intelligence to keep their mouth shut and plan it out, and the will to kill the glorious leader.

Silly, really. Jail himself should have known how fragile any grand state he might build was. He had used the exact same technique to assassinate the High Council, but the Bureau's strength lay not in any one group of people but in its institutions and systems. Uno was honestly coming to suspect that Jail had not actually thought much about the post-Bureau utopia he had spoken of to his daughters.

_You do not plan to fail. You fail to plan. _That was why Quattro, sitting across the table and affecting an intensely bored air, still did not know of the key role Uno had played in her own and Jail's second downfall. The Bureau knew that Jail could not plan for Uno's betrayal of him if he did not know it had happened, so they had very carefully suppressed that information, rounded up the informants she had pointed out and turned them, cut the lines Jail had used to communicate with them.

"So you have no plans to try and resocialize?" Uno asked casually.

Quattro's face twisted into an utterly repulsive mask of hate and rage at the suggestion. _A reflection of what the Belkan concept of her soul must appear like,_ a thought that amused Uno. "And join the weaker sisters? Those without loyalty or conscience?"

Uno could not restrain the sigh or the shake of the head this time, nor did she try. "Quattro, Quattro. You must learn to speak of things which you actually understand. Do not pretend to me that your loyalty to Father is anything but the fact he is the only one who will let you do as you please. And conscience? You used to spit the term in the same way you now use Tre's name."

Quattro stared, aghast. It actually made Uno feel rather good. "Sister, dear, if your megalomania and Jail's could see past the delusions of grandeur for a moment, you would realize that he has set himself a task geniunely impossible. And he is totally unable to evaluate the power of or preserve the usefulness of his tools. I am not a fool, sister. I can evaluate Jail's odds of success rationally. His original plan was _always _doomed, by the fleet under Admiral Harlaown. He didn't even have a chance for a plan this time, because he lacked the tools to create a workable one. No Due, no Sein. No me."

"He did dearly wish to bring you with us, Uno." Quattro said hurriedly. "He tried to, but you were not in the cell you had been assigned-"

"And had not been for six months. I asked the Bureau to falsify records. Unlike our Father, when I plan, I plan well. Quattro, who would have had the knowledge to defeat you and the Doctor's computer security measures? Who could have interrupted the functioning of your IS? You are not stupid, sister dear, merely crazy. You know exactly who did these things. You just don't want to admit it."

Quattro stared. "You…fought the Doctor. You are his _clone _Uno."

"What better reason to ensure he remains locked away? Two of us is too many." Uno replied with a smile. Then her voice turned serious, though the smile did not waver. "He betrayed me. _You _betrayed me. You tried to kill me in a stupid, blatant powergrab." Quattro opened her mouth but did not get any words out. "Do not even think to lie to me, _sister_. You did not want to kill Fate. You wanted to kill me and Tre. And the Doctor, in his _infinite wisdom_, wanted to slave his wounded ego at the cost of one of the most critical of his daughters. He _needed_ me, more than any of the others. But he decided he needed his ego more. The Engineer's Revenge comes home to those who forgot their own engineers."

Uno turned to leave the room, but paused at the door. "Enjoy your time in a cell, sister. And do think of me, during those bitter hours when you cannot sleep for frustration and anger."


	13. Tre and the Nakajimas: Family Reunion 2

Post Chapter 14 of _In The Service_. Tre is the sane, and hence rather troubled by all this, older sister. Perfect addition to the family, right?

**Tre and the Nakajimas: Family Reunion 2  
**"Name?" asked the bored customs lady at the Midchilda Entry Port.

"Tre Scaligetti." She handed over the Bureau ID card she had been given from Admiral Harlaown's hands just before leaving his ship.

That caused the customs woman to look up. "No relation to Jail Scaligetti, I hope?"

"Distantly." It was true, genetically speaking. She was genetically perhaps a cousin to the man who she regarded as father, but no closer than that.

"Unfortunate," the customs woman commiserated.

"Yes," Tre agreed. "It is."

* * *

"Genya Nakajima?"

Genya was immediately on his guard. The woman on his doorstep, late at night, had the distinctive yellow lense-like eyes of a Combat Cyborg, something he had grown quite familiar with. She looked to be the right size, and with the severe expression possibly the right age, to be the mother of Cinque. But they didn't have a mother, only a couple of older sisters. "Yes, and you are?"

"Her name is Tre, father." A young voice, a child's, but not a child's tone. "Is this why you have not answered my letters, Tre? You escaped from prison and could not receive them?" Cinque asked.

Tre noted that Cinque's hand was inside the ever-present longcoat. Prepared to come to blows with her sister, if required. Cinque had always been a practical one, a trait Tre appreciated. Tre shook her head and smiled a softer smile than Cinque had ever seen the elder Cyborg smile before. "No. I came to deliver my replies," the elder sister extended a hand to the younger one, with a sheaf of paper in it, "in person. I apologize for the delayed nature, but I have been aboard Admiral Harlaown's flagship, and not allowed to return outside communications lest someone realize that I was not in my cell."

Cinque dubiously reached around Genya for the letters and examined them. The first one was dated…yesterday. And it was the one she had actually sent yesterday as well. Cinque looked up again, with a smile. Tre was always a planner. "So you are really released?"

"Yes. A long story. If you would like to hear it…well, it is cold here on the stoop. And late. Perhaps I should return tomorrow." Tre observed.

"No." Genya replied. "Come inside. I'd like to hear it as well."

* * *

"'orning Dad, Cinque, Tre." Wendi mumbled as she came downstairs. She took several steps away from the base of the stairs before she abruptly realized what she'd said and turned back. "_TRE?"_

Tre smiled, despite the ringing in her left ear. "I see your lungpower's not been hurt by your time here, Wendi."

Dieci, Subaru, Nove, and Ginga piled down the stairs in a rush. Subaru and Ginga, Tre noted, had both thought to bring their Devices…though Subaru hadn't thought to wear a shirt or a bra. Tre smiled. "Dieci, Nove, Ginga." The elder sister winced at the reminder she actually knew Tre, along with all the others. The memory wasn't entirely welcome considering the whole brainwashing part attached to it. "I don't believe we've met, Subaru. Cinque's descriptions don't do justice."

Subtle wording, but the tone and the ghostly smile made it clear. Subaru abruptly realized she was only wearing panties and fled back upstairs to get dressed. Wendi grinned. Tre had softened up a little maybe, but it was still the same old Tre, still correcting her sister's mistakes. Even when she didn't know them.

"Why are you here, Tre?" Dieci asked.

"To see my sisters. It has been years, after all." Tre gestured to the couch. "If you mean _how_ I am here, the answer to that is something of a story, and I would like to tell everyone at once."

Nove had a different question. "Are you moving in with us? We do have a couple of spare rooms."

"I do not think so." Tre replied. "The Bureau has arranged temporary housing. And I think it likely I will…" Tre paused. She had been about to say "return to the Fleet shortly." Had her few weeks with the Navy really left that strong an impression on her, that she would start talking like a Navy mage already? Or perhaps it had been the offer, made after she left the flagship, of a Veteran Mage Specialist slot on a team of her choice, an offer she would likely to take to remain near Sette. "Be going out to take up a permanent posistion with the Bureau, soon enough."

Subaru snuck back down the stairs, now with shirt and shorts, to join everyone else. Tre noted that the others didn't occupy full couches, which explained why so many of them were scattered about the large living room. Worried about their weight breaking the furniture probably; a Combat Cyborg weighs anywhere from twice to three times what a normal human of their size and build does. "Well, since everyone is here."

"Yes, get on with the story!" Wendi insisted. Or tried to. It actually came out as far as "Yes, get on with" before Wendi's face intercepted a couch cushion from Subaru. Tre shared a glance with Genya and wondered why the man wasn't a traumatized wreck living with this particular group of her sisters.

"Our father, Jail that is, recently escaped from his imprisonment. He took Quattro with him." A set of frowns. Nobody really remembered Quattro fondly. Even those who hadn't seen her for the lunatic she was recalled their elder sister as being cutesy, but with a somehow slimey, false feeling to it. "Yes, I know, it has not been public news yet. The Bureau contacted all three of us still in prison to see if we would help. They spoke to Sette first. I do not know exactly what was said, but I do know that Sette joined up _after_ Jail was returned to custody."

"Sette did something of her own accord?" Cinque asked. It seemed…unlikely, at best.

"Prison changes a person." Tre replied. "So does discovering the capacity to hate, if anything Sette said to me about Quattro is true. I saw her briefly before returning to Mid." Tre shook that thought off, seeing her normally near-robotic protégé seethe was something that had profoundly disturbed her. "Then the Bureau spoke to Uno. Uno, it seems, had been thinking, and decided that Jail's plan was doomed from the word go by Admiral Harlaown. I find her logic hard to deny, but Uno also had issues with Jail over some of his actions in the final minutes. She wanted revenge and gladly turned on Jail."

Dieci appeared disbelieving, but it was Nove who voiced the "Really?"

Tre nodded. "Quattro tried to collapse the base, you might remember from the Bureau debriefing all of us. Quattro claimed she did it to kill Fate. Now, Jail had a backup plan for his death, but Sette, Uno, Cinque, and myself were all still in the base as well. Uno makes a very good argument that she was the most important tool in Jail's arsenal, and that she would be needed for any successful 'after'. But Jail didn't stop Quattro." Tre paused a moment, then continued. "Uno also makes a good argument Quattro did it because both I and Uno outranked her and had a habit of questioning her decisions and countermanding her orders. She wanted to be top cyborg and Jail's right hand."

"I remember the arguments about Sette." Cinque said softly. "You nearly came to blows with Quattro."

"And Uno was using that stiff tone she does when she's very upset." Nove added. "I suppose it does make sense."

Tre nodded again. "And lastly, the Bureau came to talk to me. I…well I honestly did not believe that I could tell them anything of use, particularly after I saw they also had convinced Uno. But they brought Uno and I to Bureau Headquarters and there showed us a girl they had found fighting alongside some Type Four Gadgets. You all remember them."

"The creepy ones." Nove muttered. The Type Fours, with their cloaking, penchant for dark corners, and an apparent desire to watch enemies bleed to death rather than simply kill them, hadn't been well thought of even among the Combat Cyborgs.

Tre nodded. "The creepy ones. The girl was a Combat Cyborg, named Isis. She was also a baseline human with cybernetics."

Cinque, Genya, Subaru, and Ginga all immediately got it. The collective sharp intake of breath indicated that. Nove, Wendi, and Dieci took a second longer. Dieci spoke first. "She would have only weeks to live after enhancement. The Doctor would not. He would not." Despite her words, she didn't sound very convinced.

"You saw how he treated Vivio." Cinque said softly. "She was as surely his daughter as any of us were, or any new cyborgs would be. No, Dieci. He would."

"Father, Jail…he loved us as well as he could." Tre believed it, despite all his other actions that seemed to put the lie to it. "But he was not and is not a good man." Her voice took on a quiet conviction. "I am here because of Isis, because I knew then that Jail must be stopped. I fought for the Bureau against my own father. I defended Uno while she hacked his computers and prevented him from escaping or killing himself. I killed three cyborgs and had a blade to Quattro's throat."

Tre took a deep breath. _And I learned that, maybe, the monster I see myself as exists only inside my head. _"I have made my peace with doing it. But I will understand if you cannot, sisters."

The silence lasted nearly a minute, by Cinque's estimation. Dieci was the first to speak. "You had a blade to Quattro's throat, but you didn't kill her. Why?"

"I wish I could say I wanted to do the right thing. That I wanted to offer her mercy." Tre replied "But I am not sure I actually chose the merciful alternative. Without aging treatments, Quattro will live forever. She faces a bleak eternity in prison, dying by millimeters out of sheer boredom. Morality and vengence worked out to the same answer, and I am not sure which I chose."

Nove shrugged. "Does it really matter why someone does the good or the bad thing? It's still good or bad. Intentions don't really count."

_We, _Subaru observed telepathically to Ginga, _have really screwed up family conversations._

_You wanted to adopt them all most! _Ginga replied with a grin. _And you can't deny they're still good girls._

"If you had killed Quattro…would it have upset you?" Dieci asked, again.

"I did not, so I do not know. I think, though, that had one of my companions at the time not laid out the logic I mentioned, I would have killed her and felt rather good about it. You could ask Uno about the pyschology of Quattro, but I know she is a maligant personality, and must be controlled, contained, or destroyed." Tre closed her eyes. "I used to think Jail was enough of a control on her. After Isis, I realized this was not true. So I would have killed Quattro and turned away. I made the mistake of watching someone die once, and I will never forgive myself on several levels."

Genya reached out a hand and rested it on Tre's shoulder. "I made that mistake once too. You can forgive, in time." Tre opened her eyes and turned her head, a questioning look. "I was not _always_ an old battalion commander for the Bureau. Well, regimental now. I was once young, serving with the Japanese Self-Defense Forces, and a fool. It was a long time ago."

That seemed to crystallize opinion among the Nakajimas, but Tre didn't realize it until Wendi hugged her. "It's good to have you back, big sister."


	14. Sette: Life Under Arms

I'd like to extend a very special "F U" to this site's edit/preview function, which twice ate this document while I was trying to knock it into shape.

**Sette: Life Under Arms**

_Sisters._

* * *

How else to address them? It wasn't strictly true either. Not genetically. She had come to understand that the bonds that defined family were flexible, or that there were different kinds of family. There was a surprisingly family feel to her current position.

In a way, the Mage Team was a lot like being with the Doctor and her sisters. The roles were clearly defined. The commander occupied the slot the Doctor had and his word was law, though unlike the Doctor the commander fought. The two lieutenants were the elder sisters, like Tre. The Veterans were the older line sisters. She was still essentially the youngest sister, the only person on the team who was considered just a Mage Specialist. Though now she had nearly as many brothers as she did sisters.

It could be awkward at times. She was aware she was horribly undersocialized, but she could at least make an effort to fake normalcy when speaking with another female. It was, Sette admitted to herself, a very poor faking. But it was at least an effort, a problem she could make some attempt at tackling. Try again, fail again, but fail better. With a male, she simply did not know how to act.

_

* * *

_____

I hope this letter finds you well. I know you probably doubt I mean that. You are probably also right, but I am not certain and that uncertainity is important to me of late.

_Quattro wanted me to be robotic, a puppet on her strings. After what she did at the end, it is very important to me that she failed. But the only emotion I can reliably bring to the surface so far is hate, hate for Quattro mainly. I have to be very careful about it. I could make a mistake and wind up hating a lot of people simply because I want to be able to feel._

* * *

Sette had trouble writing letters. She paused with this one, stuck, and sat back. It had taken her far too long even in her estimation to get this far, days. She had answered the letter from that new cyborg, Isis, much more quickly. Sette suspected she might have difficultly writing to her sisters because there was something there, some emotion she had never been able to properly acknowledge or express. It would be too much to say she _hoped _that was the case, because hope was an emotion Sette hadn't had much chance to explore.

What did one put in a letter, anyways? Personal thoughts, feelings. Sette was pretty short on feelings. Thoughts, she had far too many of. Perhaps putting some of them down would banish them, make them go away like exorcised demons. She fumbled around for ten minutes trying to start it.

* * *

_I am told that you have been kept busy. Ixpellia, among other things. I would like to hear about that, if you can tell me. And whatever else you have been doing since my incarceration._

* * *

Would she really like that? Sette wasn't sure. What exactly did _like_ present as? How did people, more normal people, people who'd actually been born… No, that was incorrect. Her sisters had not really been born either. She, like them, had an _activation date_. Sette wondered if the Doctor had used that term in a deliberate attempt to create a divide from pretty much all other living things, a delibrate effort to cause an us-against-them mentality. It had failed, and Sette realized she was truly alone in not knowing how to process _like_. Even her other sisters, totally separated from a normal upbringing as they had been, knew what _like_ was.

Most of them had even turned out well. Psychology, the effort to understand her own condition, was the closest thing Sette had to hobby since her incarceration. Of twelve, only three were true serial-killer material; Due, Quattro, Wendi. And Cinque had saved Wendi, channeled her maniac enthusiasm into a form that wouldn't cost her sanity.

One in four possible, one in six actual. It was actually a horrible failure rate, unacceptably high for nearly any purpose that was bought, sold, or somehow regulated. But in this case…Sette knew the statistics. The number should have been seven or eight actual. They had done far better than they should have.

* * *

_I am not sure what to tell you about my time here. I do not know what you would find interesting. It is a very different experience. You are probably aware of the differences in discipline and formality by now. The distinctive change is that when we were with the Doctor, he never wanted to use many of us for one task. Here, everything is done in a group. You are never alone. There always at least two of you, and more frequently a full team of eight. To fight as part of a group, instead of as part of a pair or alone, is a very different dynamic._

* * *

That had been the most difficult thing to adapt to. Sette had always worked with Tre, but it was a strictly support role. Tre lead, she followed. Simple, and no demands were placed on her ability to think really. She wondered if that was because she wasn't trusted to think, or if she wasn't trusted to think in a way that would make sense. Tre had trusted her to perform many tasks on her own, but very rarely ones in combat.

Time with Mage Team had taught her more about intiative then she had ever known before. At the same time, though, she did not shoulder all her own burdens. A problem for one person was a problem for the section, both her and her section leader. A problem for the section belonged to the team as a whole. If help was needed, it was made available. She had assistance, but must assist others in turn.

Mage Team combat was flight mage combat in macro. Fast, freewheeling, without boundaries. It was infantry and air combat all at once, with each participant packing the firepower of an artillery piece. Combat is always a brutally Darwinian process in which the slightest mistake can result in instant death. Combat between flight mages was only more so.

Sette knew, rationally, that even her sisters would not all be able to handle this. Tre had already proved able, but of the others? If Uno had been able to fly, she would have been a natural leader for her ability to multitask and her mental acuity. Cinque, perhaps, if able to fly. If Dieci could fly, simply because Dieci knew how to keep her cool and would adapt well to following a section leader and watching their back just like Sette herself did now. Wendi would never have managed, she simply lacked the temperament to follow properly and the mental processing power to lead. Deed perhaps, Otto perhaps…Nove and Sein most likely not.

Sette did not even consider whether Quattro would have been able to. Just the flash of anger that she was learning not to let take hold of her. Hate was powerful, and it could control her. Sette did not really distinguish letting her hate for Quattro control her from letting Quattro control her. Neither was an acceptable outcome. She promised herself would no more be a slave to her hate of the fourth Number than she would be one to Quattro herself.

* * *

_I await your reply. Please see that this gets to Uno and Tre as well. I understand they played an important role in dealing with Father's recent escape and I did not get the chance to hear much of it._

_Regards, Sette._

* * *

Jail's escape and recapture had just been officially announced. The most troublesome part of the letter for the length of it though was the salutation. It took her nearly a half-hour to come up with one that wasn't an outright lie. She could not put "Love" or "Your Friend". Lying to her sisters was not acceptable behavior. Not at all.


	15. Going To Church: Otto, Deed, and Sein

Sette, Otto, and Deed were all "born" in 0075, the same year StrikerS begins. Three years pass between that and Soundstage X. Thus, by now, they're..._three years old._ Maybe four, if you squint really hard. And people wonder why they seem emotionally stunted!

**Going To Church: Otto, Deed, and Sein**  
"Sette has sent us a letter." Otto informed Sein.

"Sette can write?" Sein demanded.

Otto resisted the urge to sigh. Ever since Deed had made her intentions to leave the Church known, Sein had grown more and more insufferable. And not the fun goofy Sein kind of insufferable, the angry controlling kind of insufferable. "The Doctor wanted us all to learn, in case you have forgotten." It was a struggle to keep her normal tone, and not get sarcastic. _Why didn't I try to get adopted by Genya Nakajima?_ Otto asked herself. Sein was taking Deed's leaving very personally. Something romantic? Loss of the favored voyeurism target? Incomprehensible Sein-ness? Did it really matter when it made Sein behave like a raging lunatic?

"And since Sette was such a goody-two-shoes," Sein clearly couldn't see Otto frowning heavily behind her back, nor the way the boyish cyborg was looking around herself for something to throw, "of course she learned it."

"I will inform Deed." Otto said. The boyish cyborg's idea of sarcasm was an absolute deadpan, nearly a match for Sette's total monotone. Her idea of expressing "I'm fed up with you and this is your final warning", however, involved chucking Sein's bed at Sein.

By the time Sein understood what just hit her and struggled out of the wreckage that used to be her bed before it was picked up and thrown across the room by a cyborg that can probably benchpress a car into another cyborg that can probably take getting hit by that same car, Otto was long gone.

And Schach was there, staring and trying to wrap her head around what could possibly have happened to reduce a very nice bed to matchsticks and stuffing. Sein muttered something about having a score to settle with Otto and stalked past Schach, only to be caught by the shoulder.

_"Not until you clean that up."

* * *

_

"Deed?" Otto called. The other cyborg had taken to the basement as a place to stay. After years of underground cave-like Jail-designed bases, all the Combat Cyborgs found basements to be positively homey. The ones that had joined the Nakajima family were all busily pressing Genya to get a new house, appropriate to his new rank, and with a basement.

"Otto." Deed replied, poking her head around a corner. "Come to try and talk me out of it?"

"You ask that every time I stop by, but I have yet to actually do so. I respect your ability to reason for yourself." Otto replied. "Would it make you feel better if I tried?"

Deed regarded the other cyborg for a few moments, considering. "No, I suppose it would not."

Otto nodded and summoned up a holowindow. "I thought not. Sette has sent us a letter. Would you care to read it with me?"

"Certainly." Deed agreed. She glanced at the routing information at the top of the message. "It seems Sette has joined the Navy."

The two read Sette's letter in silence, although an outside observer would have noted that they did so in apparent sync, with the same motion of the eyes. Same expressions at the same points as well, though it took skill at reading people to realize their expressions actually changed.

Otto leaned against a wall, a mannerism she had learned from Verossa Acous. "Sette seems very different."

"Don't we all?" Deed replied, with a hint of irony. "You found religion, Sein perhaps as well. I am surprised Sette has apparently overcome Quattro's conditioning. I always assumed it was physiological and not psychological."

"I think the Doctor would have let Tre disassemble Quattro if it was. Sette is still young. So are we, for that matter. " People often did not appreciate the fact that one reason some of the Numbers were emotionally stunted had nothing to do with Quattro, and everything to do with the fact that Otto, Deed, and Sette were only three years old. Emotions were still a fairly new concept, and rather more complex than simple combat tactics.

"Speak for yourself." Otto sniffed.

Deed replied with an uncharacteristic grin. "What, you think Zafira is really into you? He has more reason to be cautious about such things then we do. And doesn't seem the type to cradle-rob."

Otto glared. She was touchy about her relationship with Zafira, which was rife with chances for people to get all the genders wrong because of naming...and also because people might assume exactly what Deed was saying about Zafira, who deserved much better than that. "Don't start."

Deed gently gave Otto's shoulder a push. "Teasing, sister. Calm down. I admire your ingenuity in finding someone you won't accidentally break, for the record."

"Restraint is the path to perfection." Otto quoted, a saying of the Sankt Kaiser's and one of Schach's favorites. "You will just have to learn it." It _almost_ brought a grin to her face to be able to use one of Schach's quotations for something she regarded as useful.

"I have heard some rumors there was a male cyborg in the batch Jail cooked up during his short-lived escape. Perhaps he would be interesting..." Deed speculated.

Otto snorted. "Zafira did not have good things to say about that one. He might have opted to for the stay aboard the orbital penal complex from how dense he sounded."

"Otto!" Sein screeched from the doorway. "I just spent ten minutes cleaning up what was left of my bed and you're a raging jack-"

"Do not tempt me to throw one of the old wine racks," Otto actually wasn't sure they were wine racks, they didn't look like anything in particular, but everyone seemed to assume they were wine racks. "You have been decidedly unpleasant since Deed decided she would leave eventually. Consider that your final warning."

Sein sighed. "I just always thought you two would be the last of us to go your separate ways."

Deed raised her eyebrows. "Because we are twins? Why should any of us drift apart at all, anyways?

"Yes, because you're twins, and because you've always been close for a reason, as opposed to Tre and Sette or any of our other little pairings. And we will, eventually, drift apart." Sein asserted. "You keep forgetting we're not as mortal as the rest of these people. That's a good thing, but..."

Otto and Deed both shifted uncomfortably in mirror image of each other, but it was Deed who spoke. "Do not remind us, Sein. Please. I am already uncomfortable enough with it."

Sein nodded and hugged the two younger cyborgs. "All right. All right. But Deed, if you ever need us again, you know..."

"I need merely call." Deed replied, hugging back. "Thank you, sister."


	16. Sette and Tre: Different Languages

Post latest chapter of _In The Service_. Gee, that name's not foreshadowing anything at all is it?

**Speaking A Different Language: Sette and Tre**

"Sette."

Sette looked up from her Inherent Equipment, examining the attachments the Bureau had made for signs of damage or other maintenance problems. The IE was simple, and dumb. Even a Storage or Armed Device was smart enough to warn you if it broke down. "Tre." You _could_ sir a non-commissioned superior. It just wasn't done normally. "Signum has been asking after you."

"I know. Why aren't you in sickbay? I know you took a hit." Tre replied.

Sette worked a shoulder around. She was still in pain from her wound, honestly, but a little thing like that wouldn't stop her. "Wound was not incapacitating. Failed to penetrate the chestplate. I remain fit for duty."

Tre sighed. "Tell me you at least took the proscribed painkillers."

Sette shook her head. "I did, but they have worn off." The problem with being bioengineered was that effective medication for pain was pretty much impossible without an IV drip. The Combat Cyborg's body broke down or filtered out the pain meds too fast. "Full repair is currently not available. The Commander has cleared me for light duty despite my protests I could handle full. He cited the possibility of damage we are not equipped to diagnose."

Tre sighed again. Sette had never been good at taking care of herself. Like a child, her idea of knowing her limits involved running into them like a brick wall rather than assessing the risks and her own capabilities. Sette had taken a hit that had cleanly pierced her Barrier Jacket, a spike-nosed slug of iron and tungsten about five millimeters in diameter accelerated to hypersonic velocity. That the chestplate of Sette's cybernetics had stopped it was an incredible testament to Jail's design and manufacture. The remaining blunt-force chest trauma would still have killed an ordinary human, but Sette had kept fighting despite being aware of a resulting misalignment in her left shoulder joint. Then, to compound the issue, the locals had mistaken her for a New Belkan and hit her in the left shoulder with an AT4, which her Barrier Jacket stopped, but which Sette decided still wasn't enough stress on her systems to merit seeing a medic yet.

She had then scared the hell out of the medical staff with the condition her shoulder and arm joints were in despite the fact she was continuing to use them, and massive bruising that by rights should have made it too painful to continue to function normally. But it was Sette; pain was no excuse. Tre knew that Sette, like all the younger sisters, did not have the ability to control her pain reception. On one hand, it was admirable.

On the other, being superhuman was not a license to abandon good sense. Tre had the ability to turn off her pain receptors, all of them. In all twenty-three years of her life, she had never once done so. She muted some of them, quite often; reducing the sensitivity so it was uniform across her body, rather than leaving spots where you could hit her and trigger outsized response. But Jail had impressed on her, along with the other first four, that pain ultimately exists as both a warning to not do that and that you are not functioning at full capacity. It served a purpose, and Sette didn't seem to grasp that, treating pain as an aberration of biology to be conquered or ignored.

Tre tried to come up with a way to frame the argument that Sette would accept. "You need to show more care, Sette. If you recklessly get yourself disabled on the field, then we are obliged to try and protect you until you can be evacuated." Tre paused a moment. "And full repairs are not easily available anymore. There are only a couple of facilities equipped to properly repair a badly damaged Combat Cyborg. Your aggression is admirable, but you must temper it with the knowledge that you will be needed in good condition for future battles."

Sette considered for roughly five seconds. "I proved able to take hits from the New Belkan's mass weapons, however. As long as they remained on the field, I might be needed. At the least to draw fire so others could deal with the weapon, since I am more likely to survive that."

Tre resisted the urge to borrow one of the swears she'd learned since she first met a Mage Team member. Sette was perfectly rational; too rational, sometimes. It was like Uno without a conversational filter to know what's right and wrong. Or some kind of computer. "Do you think the Commander would _ever_ use you that way? Particularly against a weapon of unknown power and capabilities? You are one of his most valuable assets. Preserving you for future operations is preserving nearly a quarter of team's aggregate combat power." Things didn't break down _quite_ that neatly, but there was a good deal of truth in what Tre was saying. She and Sette were a lot tougher than the Navy folks, and Sette was considerably more effective at close quarters than anyone else on the team because of her ability to use and coordinate multiple weapons.

Sette considered for roughly five seconds again. "That is logical." It was utterly lost on her that one of the main reasons she'd never be used that way was that the Bureau didn't do it to anyone. Mages, especially flight mages, were rare and too valuable to be risked in such a way. A forgivable, amateur tactician's mistake, win the battle but lose the war. It was also lost on Sette that the loss or serious injury of one of the cyborgs would be a clearcut signal that this mission was likely to kill the rest of the team, who weren't nearly as tough. Concepts like morale or will to combat were completely foreign to the younger cyborg.

A pause. "Tre...if I could have your perspective on something? Isis would like me to visit sometime, and meet a pair of her friends. She's especially talked about a girl named Cypha."

"Do you not want to go?" Trying to talk feelings with Sette was like trying to explain nuclear physics to a dolphin. You didn't know the rules, and it didn't know the rules, and you not only didn't speak a common language but couldn't.

Sette quickly shook her head. "No, no, I would like to go." Was that a hint of worry in the usual monotone? Tre wasn't sure. Simply listening for emotion from Sette was something she was still unused to. "I am not sure when that will be possible, however. Home leave is likely to be rare. And her friends, her...I can _write_ emotion, Tre, but I do not know how to show it. Not properly. What will they think of me?"

Tre rested a hand on her sister's shoulder. "Then you should practice more. I'll help."

Sette tried a smile. It didn't hurt, and Tre smiled back, so she left it there.


	17. The Nakajimas and Uno: Practice

**The Nakajimas and Uno: Practice Makes Perfect**

"Do people actually _believe_ this stuff?" Nove asked of no one in particular. "That the colonies are being sold out to the New Belkans?" Riot duty was never fun, but then most people doing riot duty weren't Combat Cyborgs. After a few unfortunates had rushed them and been disabled with a couple quick jabs and being bodily lifted from their feet by teenaged girls, things had died down. Humiliation was a powerful weapon, and the hard-core rowdies were proud of being hard-core. Getting disabled and hauled off by a teenaged girl really ruined that image. Now it was more of proper protest.

"Did we ever believe the Doctor?" Dieci replied reasonably, swinging her weapon back and forth slowly from her position atop a building. If knocking out huge swathes of the protest was necessary, she was ready.

Though honestly, the protest had been gratifyingly small so far. A couple hundred at most. Digging up anti-Bureau sentiment was never easy on Midchilda. On some of the old Belkan worlds you could always find a core of people who wanted to keep fighting the last two years of the Belkan Civil War, but Mid was a pretty hostile environment for anti-Bureau types.

"Still, this level of raw stupidity. I was kind of hoping only Wendi di-" Nove was abruptly cut off mid-sentence.

"No personal remarks." Cinque said sharply. A slightly taller, slightly older-looking Cinque. She had finally opted for the aging treatments to make her current job easier. Being small and light didn't always work out. "You can catfight on your own time, not the Bureau's."

_Cinque, red hat, in front of you, ten meters._ Wendi said over her built-in radio. She was parked on a roof too, Dieci's spotter. _I think they have a Device_. Civilian mages occupied a strange space in Bureau society. Mages who were not serving were not fully trusted by most people, unless old enough that they had probably retired from active duty. Most of them didn't care to advertise they were mages by doing something like carrying a Device. Even wearing jewelry casually was rare considering Device storage modes.

_I see them. They're just standing and shouting silly things,_ Cinque replied. _Let's not be_-_shit! Dieci!_ The Device had come out of storage mode. It was a sword, and there was no peaceful use of a sword.

"No shot." Dieci replied, with none of the frustration that she must have felt. More modifications to her replacement weapon, letting it be used for large or small targets, and more training for her, and now she couldn't use either. The crowd was starting to wake up, scramble away from the man, but not all of them yet realized their danger.

Cinque pushed forward, and the crowd parted after she manhandled someone roughly three times her size out of the way.

And the mage grabbed the person next to them and put their Device, a sword, to their throat. "Back off little girl."

"Drop the weapon and step away." Cinque replied. She wished she was as big as Tre. You just couldn't intimidate people at Cinque's size.

"She's coming with me," The man broke off as Nove leaped, the way only a Combat Cyborg could, somewhere between ten and fifteen meters length and at least four in height.

"Not happening!" Nove replied from his other side. When standard intimidation fails, do something completely impossible. What exactly was going on here was completely unclear to Nove, but then it didn't have to be. Somebody was acting up and she slapped them down. It was The Order Of Things.

"She's coming with me!" Getting a bit agitated now, realizing his plan, whatever plan he'd had, wasn't going to work.

"That won't work and you know it." Cinque replied. "Put the weapon down, step away from the girl, and tell us all about it." Well, if you can't be threatening, be nonthreatening. Invite confidence. Cinque was good at that, after managing a household full of semi-fit-for-normal-society cyborgs. "This is a bad plan. Just stop, it will get worse."

"No it won-" It was at that point that the person's image appeared to waver to Dieci, the new weapon she'd been given included an experimental function to see through disguise magic.

And what she saw... _"Rogue Wolkenritter!" _The gun in her hands roared, a full-power full-dispersion shot at nonlethal settings, while Wendi started manhandling her own weapon into position.

Cinque wasn't sure if she should jump back or forward. Nove, however, gave it a two-count knowing that Dieci would fire, and then leaped at the back of the man who was not a man at all.

They had either missed Dieci's presence or dismissed it. Either way, the hit left the woman hostage out cold and the not-man woozy, revealing a Signum clone. But instead of the usual metallic armor and blood-red fabric, a simple form-fitting bodysuit also in black, with black skirt as an addition.

If they hadn't been already woozy, doubtless the Signum clone would have thrown Nove off while barely breaking stride, but they were woozy and their uncoordinated attempt at a throw let Nove hang on, bring her wrist-mounted gun up and into contact with their head, and open fire.

The scene froze, the crowd and fake Signum dissolved, and Nove landed, catlike, on her feet. "We do good?"

Uno stepped away from her array of holowindows and offered her best grin. Grinning was hard for her; she didn't really want to look like her father and most of her grins managed to look far too much like Jail at his most maniac. It was hard to not look like him, after all; she was his clone. "Better than anyone else who has gone through that scenario. Of course, you should."

Cinque shook her head. "You made it easy to identify them."

"That was the scenario. And it is difficult to hide an active Device. I was honestly surprised none of you identified Levantine right away." Uno replied. "Of course, until it goes through active testing against a live illusion later this week, Dieci's ability to see-through is speculatory..." Uno offered a shrug. It was a mannerism that she had grown fond of, because it was a mannerism that Jail would never adopt. Jail Scaligetti would _never_ admit uncertainty."It _should_ work."

"What was with the different outfit?" Wendi asked, having used her cannon, and skyboard, to bring both herself and Dieci down off the building.

"New intelligence." Uno replied. "The ones you've already met are apparently the less-reliable sort. They're really good at killing things, poor at taking orders or discipline. Because they are insane." And the other ones, Uno thought to herself, supposedly share my problem. They are _too_ sane.

Perfect rationality had a dark side. To a perfectly rational mind, after all, no thought is unthinkable. No action unjustifiable. And then you wander off the edge of the abyss by accident. Uno did not want to end up like Jail had.

"So we pass." Nove said. "Not that we wouldn't since if your average Ground Forces types could make it through this-"

"Most of them do not." Uno replied. "I have run this scenario for over a hundred groups so far and you represent only the third to have completed it, and the first without a fatality amongst yourselves, much less the civilians." A pause. "I'm told you're now formally being grouped together, as a unit?"

"Not until Cinque's finished her officer course." Wendi replied, reaching over to ruffle the smaller cyborg's hair, and then snatching her hand back rapidly when Cinque grabbed for it. "Supposedly."

"They want Subaru and Ginga back too. Ginga will probably lead." Cinque added. "I'm just a backup. Not fond of the acronym they're giving us."

Uno raised an eyebrow. "Oh?"

"Special Personnel And Tactics." Nove said shortly. She looked at Wendi. _"Don't-_"

"Spat!" Wendi giggled.

Uno dissolved into helpless laughter for the first time in her life. It felt so good to just laugh. To not care, for a little while. To indisputably not be like her father.

Nove carefully reached out and poked the oldest Combat Cyborg in confusion, but got no response. "I think," Wendi observed _sotto voce_, "that we've broken her."

Uno could only laugh more.


	18. Otto, Deed, and Sein: Birthrights

In which Vivio having something as lame as a stuffed bunny for a Device is totally thrashed, and EC Divider Code-928 gets away. Why yes, you _did _read that last bit correctly.

Credit goes to...uh...Andy, friend of Unstoppable Foxy Shazam (who is sometimes called David) from Steam, for saving me from relying on Google to translate some German. (Yeah, I was really fishing at 3:14 in the AM, but I did find somebody to translate for me!)

**Otto, Deed, and Sein: Birthrights**

"Your Majesty." Otto bowed formally to Vivio.

Vivio frowned heavily and gave Otto's head a push in response, since she could reach it because of the low bow. "Not my name!"

Sein grinned. "Sorry. But it's the Church's idea of tradition, Your Majesty."

Vivio attempted to puff up in imitation of the way she'd seen her mamas draw themselves up before exerting their authority. "Well if I'm the Sankt Kaiser, doesn't that mean I make the rules?"

It took most of Sein's self-control to _not_ ruffle Vivio's hair and laugh. But that wouldn't do at all, and besides Schach would murder Sein for it. "I'm not sure. That would be a question for Knight Carim."

This wasn't Midchilda. Administrated World #42, Belka. The original, the spiritual home of both the Saint Church and all Belkans. It was the one world completely controlled and administrated by the Saint Church.

Vivio coming here one day was as inevitable as gravity and taxes. Not as inevitable as death, not anymore, since the Wolkenritter and then Jail had both proved death was no longer inevitable. The Combat Cyborgs were both ceremonial and very real guards. If Vivio were somehow hurt, or killed, then no power in the universe would prevent Nanoha Takamachi from bringing everyone who had screwed up a swift and painful end.

There was also the minor matter that to gain and lose the Sankt Kaiser again would set the church on fire. Loss of faith would be a wholly inadequate way to describe the result. It didn't _matter_ whether there was a real threat. Vivio had to be protected at any cost. They had even brought in Deed, who was technically no longer a member of the Church. It was more the threat of Nanoha that kept Sein focused though.

"Your Majesty." Sein took a perverse pleasure from seeing even Carim Gracia bow. "Welcome to Belka."

"Is there any way to get you to stop calling me Your Majesty?" Vivio asked.

Carim smiled. "No." She had to work hard at not chuckling when Vivio pouted.

"I'll stop." Deed said, soft volume, not much tone though. "Since I am not a member of the Church anymore."

"Then I'm only talking to Deed!" Vivio declared. Everyone else winced. This would be awkward.

"If you'll follow us, please?" Carim asked. Vivio nodded. Well, at least the only talking to Deed was meant literally.

Vivio followed along, the Combat Cyborgs close on either side, Carim and Schach ahead like a pride of lions. If Carim could have arranged to have the halls of the cathedral cleared for this visit, she would have. That was just a bit beyond her, though.

It made Schach nervous, the number of people staring at Vivio. Though that probably couldn't be helped. Back on Mid, the rather fearsome reputation of her mamas kept people from hassling Vivio about the whole reincarnation thing too much. Here, in the most hallowed location in all of the universe as far as the Saint Church was concerned, it was a different matter. It was the presence of Schach that kept it limited to stares alone, the fear that anyone who spoke unwisely here might provoke the wrath of one of the best of Church's knights.

There was momentary confusion, though, as Vivio suddenly changed course. Deed was on the verge of asking Vivio about it when the expression of concentration on the child's face stopped her. Now Vivio lead the way, down a floor, towards the rear of the building.

She stopped in a doorway, and both Schach and Carim drew a breath in surprise, though neither was noticed. Vivio looked up. "There's a room like this in school isn't there?"

Schach shook her head slowly. "No, Vivio. There is not."

_Where are we, Sister?_ Sein inquired telepathically of Schach. The innate playfulness of the Combat Cyborg bled through her telepathy.

_Approximately ten paces from where the Sankt Kaiser died,_ was the reply. Schach's mind, on the other hand, was all ordered seriousness. And now, confusion.

"Been here before." Vivio murmured, confused, looking around, one foot up as if take another step, then lowered again as if unsure. One of her hands was held out in front of her, opening and closing as if trying to grip something that was not there. "But it was different."

What was occurring in front of her, Otto noted, was strictly impossible. Not should not be happening, not would not be happening, could not be happening. At all. Period. The concept of genetic memory was bunk, as had been proved long before the Doctor came along. Several of the cyborgs used genetic material from others. Tre, for example, was genetically related to both Jail Scaligetti and Fate Testarossa Harlaown. But Tre shared no memories from either of them.

It was happening anyways, in defiance of its strict impossibility. Faith is the belief in the absence of proof, Otto told herself. And I have accepted the concept of faith. But still, as a cyborg, with a computer plugged directly into her brain and a computer's demands for mathematically quantifiable proof, some part of her would forever rebel.

For Sein it was actually harder. She was intimately familiar with the absurd and the bizarre. Her ability to move through solid matter was just such a thing, a quantum mechanical effect on scale that, prior to Sein herself, had been considered impossible. It was the familiarity with where the boundaries of a sane universe lay that made it hard to accept; knowing the limits well meant knowing how they were defined and being able to more easily tell when things fell outside of them.

It was only Deed who noticed they were being followed. It was only Deed who reacted when the weapon came out. Her energy blade intersected the path of his weapon, a strange combination of gun and sword. He appeared quite surprised that her blade held up to his, but drew it back nonetheless and shot Deed in the stomach.

The individual slugs of what was apparently a load of buckshot passed through her Barrier Jacket with ease, but it was a gunpowder weapon and should not have. It could not, however, beat the carefully designed, cunningly segmented centimeter of overlapping titanium-ceramic plates beneath that. Nor could a load of buckshot, which should have blown someone like Deed off her feet, beat the raw inertia that came with the extra weight of Combat Cyborg enhancements.

Deed brought both her blades down before he could recover and damaged the gun portion of the weapon. He reversed it fast, too fast for an unaugmented human, even for most mages. Not quick enough, though. Sein had already dove through the wall and emerged behind him, and Otto had her hands up and formed into fists. She couldn't use her IS here; Ray Storm was not precise enough to target a single individual engaged in melee combat, and might well bring down the whole building with its collateral damage.

Schach pushed both Carim and Vivio into the room off the hallway and turned, calling up her Barrier Jacket and Widenschaft, barring the way to her two charges with her own body. She noted blue wings tattooed on the man's neck.

"Huckebein." The word was strange to Deed, though she was the one who'd spoken it. Her body, her Combat Cyborg implants, were reacting to hardcoded information that she was not consciously aware of. The loss of conscious control of her body was deeply disturbing. "Stand down or be destroyed."

"Fat chance."

Sein, moving against her will, reached out and snapped the man's neck from behind. He collapsed immediately as she recoiled in horror. "What did I just _do?_"

"Sein!" Schach said sharply, shocked.

"I didn't mean to do it! My implants are malfunctioning or something!" Sein replied. "Just stay away from me for now, I'm not sure I have motor control! I don't want to hurt anybody!"

"I was reacting to commands not given by my conscious mind. I am not even sure what Huckebein means." Deed agreed. "The Doctor left us a gift he did not tell us of."

Schach started to advance, reaching out to check the man's pulse. Deed caught her wrist and pulled the nun back. "Do not touch him. He is a biohazard."

"How do you know?" Schach asked.

"I am not sure, but I _know_." Deed replied. "Do not touch him. He is infected with something."

"His weapon." Otto said. "Where is is his weapon?"

"I do not see it." Deed agreed. "Sein?"

Sein dove into the floor briefly, then resurfaced. "Not under him. It's gone somewhere. I think it teleported." Then she turned to stop a group of Church knights. "Not any closer, we have a biohazard here."

Vivio peered at the man from around Carim. And held something in her hands. Carim turned, and the breath caught in her throat. "Vivio..."

"What?" Vivio asked, awkwardly holding a silver longblade not dissimilar in overall style or size from Levantine. It was clearly not scaled for the child-sized Vivio, but apparently light enough that she could hold it with ease. On the blade was inscribed something in Old Belkan.

"Where did you get that?" Carim asked softly.

"I'm not...sure." Vivio said, frowning at the blade. "It just appeared when I realized there was danger."

Schach caught sight of what Vivio was hold as well. "That can't be. That's the Sankt Kaiser's weapon. It was lost when she died. The blade would serve no other-"

"**Wahrheit****.**" the silver blade intoned.

"_Truth Will Win Out_." Otto read the inscription in a voice that suggested even she was quietly awed. "I guess that proves she's the Sankt Kaiser..."


	19. Sette and Tre: Bad Vacation

I should note that I assume Huckebein, despite their incredible regenerative powers, are still subject to basic physics. Signum hacked off Cypha's arm once, and the AEC Devices from Force seem to be predicated on the idea that you can harm the Huckebein with direct physical effects. Similarly Cypha did not _instantly_ regenerate, so anything that inflicts instant death should still work on them.

**Sette and Tre: Bad Vacation**

"Holocall?" Sette asked.

"Settling details with the Commander." Tre replied, stepping onto the teleporter platform and feeling the momentary sense of disorientation. Normal people didn't feel anything when teleported, but Combat Cyborgs were dimly aware of the shift via their implants.

At that precise moment, the call cut out. It should have transferred seamlessly. Tre muttered something unkind and then looked around.

No operator. The operator's station was damaged. Tre smelled smoke, plastic and wood fires.

Sette had already summoned one of her IE blades to her hands. "This is not correct."

"No." Tre agreed. Invicta unfolded from its extradimensional space with the usual "**Los ghets!**"

"We cannot return or pass a warning." Sette said. She was the least human of the Combat Cyborgs, but that also meant she was the most in touch with her enhancements. Sette saw everything where the others could sometimes be distracted. And where the other cyborgs could take crucial seconds to remember something, Sette's was instant, and the teleport operator station was damaged beyond repair.

"Then we do what we can here." Tre replied. "Let's find your friend."

Desolation. The teleport building appeared to be the only one still intact. Many of the buildings appeared to have been intentionally scattered instead of merely collapsed, spread out over the ground in a thin layer of rubble. It seemed to have been done for the express purpose of making the bodies show up easily.

And there were far too many bodies. Even under the Doctor, Tre had never seen anything like this. A human would have been able to hold out hope they were not all dead. Tre could read their temperature through her eye implants and knew most of them had been dead for hours.

Fires burned in the building behind them, and in scattered areas nearby, but seemed localized to the center of town. Sette knew the way, flying ahead. It was a quick trip, just a few minutes even at the relatively slow pace Sette had adopted.

Someone had tried to kill Isis too, but had not reckoned with the fact she was the littlest of the Combat Cyborgs. She had pulled another person from the wreckage of what had been her home as well, a boy older than her.

Perhaps he would be embarrassed later that Isis had pulled him from the wreckage, Sette thought. She flew closer for a landing and tried her best to modulate her voice to simulate non-threatening concern. "Isis?"

"Sette?" Isis asked hesitantly. They'd exchanged a couple of video letters, just in the last two days. Isis herself had a head wound, but having a skull made of metal had its uses. "Thoma's hurt..."

"I'll see to him." Tre said. She knelt over the boy. He was a few years older than Isis, unconscious, bleeding from a deep wound to both legs, but it had missed his arteries somehow. Tre grabbed a scrap of cloth from nearby and tore it into strips to bind the wound, hoping it was clean enough.

"Cypha?" Isis said hesitantly, looking past the two Combat Cyborgs. Tre rose and turned at once, to confront someone a little shorter than herself, late teens, covered in blood.

"Yes." Cypha replied. "Isis, are you all right?"

The fact Cypha had snuck up on a pair of Combat Cyborgs would have instantly put Tre on guard. But there was more, something that was naggingly familiar. A strangeness of her motions, sounding like she was reading from a script somehow. Recognition floated just out of reach, but Tre _knew_ something was wrong.

A tattoo on Cypha's neck. A blue wing. Tre'd seen it once before, she knew it, but maddeningly the specific memory did not come. That wasn't possible; Tre was a Combat Cyborg. She had a hundred percent perfect recall. But she _knew_ she'd seen that somewhere still.

Cypha didn't _move_ normally. Her expressions looked _wrong_, her eyes looked wrong, she kept her head on a swivel, like a soldier expecting trouble. Her body language screamed the wrong reactions to go with her words and expressions.

A normal human would have been unable to distinguish whether Cypha was herself injured, considering the amount of blood on her. A Combat Cyborg, with advanced visual processing built in, could do so at a glance. As she assessed that and realized the girl was not hurt, Tre realized that the motion of Cypha's left sleeve did not correspond quite the way it should with the motion of her arm; a concealed weapon.

_Sette, Cypha's armed._ Tre warned.

Sette did not display how startled she felt. A simple onceover, an identification routine the Doctor had taught, and she spotted it too. Cypha had been friendly. Kind to Isis. Sette had actually been _looking forward_ to meeting Cypha. _And not injured. You believe she is responsible?_ Sette's telepathy put the lie to her unchanging exterior, tentative, uncertain emotion and a cold combat void that coexisted rather than the void suppressing the emotion as Signum or the Commander did.

_I believe trusting an armed woman covered in blood that is not her own is stupid._ Tre replied.

The identification routine also brought other thoughts to the surface, a single word whose meaning Sette did not understand. _Huckebein. _

Cypha must have registered a change in Tre's stance, a dagger falling into her hand out of her sleeve and a lunging thrust intended to take the older Combat Cyborg in the gut even as Sette called out a warning. It might have worked on an unaugmented human, but not on Tre. Her hand came up and she slapped Cypha's dagger hand aside, grabbing Cypha by the elbow and pulling with enough force that the joint audibly popped out of alignment. Cypha stumbled back, grabbing at her elbow and swearing aloud. The enhanced strength of a Combat Cyborg made it ridiculously easy to disable human opponents, once you learned how.

Then Cypha popped the joint back in. Somewhere in the back of her mind, Tre clinically assessed that attempting that task should have made any normal human scream in agony. "Think you're smart, knowing I can't regen if it'll just set wrong..."

It made no sense at all Tre, but it didn't have to either. _Sette. Isis and Tohma are the only people who know what happened here. Get them to safety. _It felt like the old days, giving orders to Sette and seeing her instantly obey. "I.S. Ride Impulse."

"**Ja!**" Invicta agreed, the bright wings of her Inherent Equipment snapping into existence. The encasing energy for her hands, however, failed to materialize. "**Ausfalle.**" Breakdown. Invicta was damaged somehow. It hadn't come into contact with anything but Cypha's arm briefly. The Inherent Equipment, though, seemed to work perfectly. Jail had designed it simple and tough to break. Invicta was still new, only a few months old. It barely qualified as well-tested, honestly.

"We'll fix your Device, don't worry." Cypha said. She seemed to be enjoying herself.

Bad memories of the Signum clone that had called her "Machine" once flooded Tre's mind. "Like you fixed everyone here?"

Cypha's smile was wide, and somehow unnatural. "Just like that."

Revulsion was a familiar emotion for Tre. But it was usually something she felt for herself, in the dark hours of the night, alone with the ghosts of her past. Not for another. She fought hard to avoid making great moral judgments, to avoid the trap her father had fallen into. And she was trying to fight off a nearly atavistic reaction to Cypha, something in her subconscious that wanted her to strike, now, and destroy the girl forever.

But that smile. That abominable smile. Tre knew, with absolute certainty, that she had just seen the face of evil. Not petty evil, evil on grand scale, evil for no purpose but to do evil. And she was a soldier, a fighter. Breaking things and people was what she did, and the face of evil was right there. Would she ever be able to forgive herself if she did not at least _try_?

No. Choice made then.

Tre lashed out at Cypha, a slow blow to gauge Cypha's reaction times and responses. Quick, though not as fast as Tre herself. Cypha drew back out of range, or at least what she thought was out of range. The truth was that "out of reach" was a tenuous safety when Tre could break the speed of sound in a tenth of a second, from a standing start.

"**Engage Koing 944.**" Cypha's dagger intoned, then as she slammed it into her own palm, "**React!**" Swords, two of them. Flashy guards with spikes on them, probably to cover for the fact that the larger of the two was too stupidly long to make a good weapon, when it would so easy to step inside its swing. Tre decided to test that by experiment.

It worked, and Cypha dropped the smaller blade, cut tendons in her wrist and fingers unable to hold it. A moment later the wound started to heal rapidly, and it was gone entirely within five seconds. Cypha smiled again. "Surprised, are we?"

"Fool." Tre replied. "I just learned I will simply have to remove your head to stop you. And I know now that I can do it."

Cypha took a step back as she realized Tre was right. Tre's Inherent Equipment was resisting damage from Cypha's anti-magic nature and the blades, despite being apparent magery, could cut Cypha. This little massacre of hers had just gone completely off-script, and she might be about to pay with her life.

* * *

"Sette!" Isis said. "Slow down!"

"Can't." Sette replied. "Have to get you somewhere far away."

"No, slow down! Thoma looks like he's going to be sick." Isis' tone was urgent.

Sette immediately dropped her speed from over the sound barrier to far under it and looked for a good spot to land. Throwing up while unconscious could result in choking on your own vomit and dying. She had been given a direct order to preserve Thoma's life. If he got airsick and died, that would be a failure on her part. Still, a few minutes at around twice the speed of sound meant she had covered a great deal of distance from her starting point. They might be safe, at least for now.

Isis gently shook Thoma's shoulder while Sette tried to hold him both upright and in a position where if he had to vomit, he'd get it out. That meant holding his mouth open, which greatly confused him as he woke up. Sette carefully let him go, once she was sure he wouldn't immediately fall over.

"...are you an angel?" Thoma asked.

Someone else might have blushed. Sette cocked her head in a bad impression of Tre's confused look, which was itself a learned behavior taken from someone else; the Doctor had not encouraged expressions and emotions that betrayed a lack of knowledge. "Far from it. And you are very much alive."

"Thoma, are you okay?" Isis asked urgently, tugging his sleeve.

"Don't feel very well." Thoma replied weakly. He was pale, but no longer bleeding at least. "Where's Cypha? She came into the house and started stabbing my parents..."

"Blood loss." Sette assessed, surprised to hear a note of worry in her own tone. "Cypha is far away, and will get farther if I can help it. History of airsickness, Thoma?" It felt strange to be addressing someone she did not know by their first name. Whether it was awkward was something Sette could not tell. She had yet to figure out what exactly _awkward_ felt like.

"Not been in the air to find out. You're Sette, Isis' friend?" Thoma asked.

"Yes." Sette agreed. Then she raised a hand a moment, cocking her head to better listen to something only she could hear.

_Sette, Tre._

_Here._ Sette replied. Radio, not telepathy. As private and secure as telepathy, but also a private code between the two cyborgs. If forced to communicate silently, telepathy. If doing it willingly, radio.

_Cypha booked it. Teleport. Bureau personnel are on the scene. What's going on?_

_Thoma and Isis could use medical attention, but are in no immediate danger that I can tell._ Sette replied. _Passing coordinates. Will remain in place._

"It's over." Sette said softly. "Cypha is gone." But it wasn't really over for them, was it? It wouldn't ever be. Thoma had seen his parents killed in front of him. Isis had lost everyone. Twice.

Except for Sette. And this, this must be what apprehension was like. To be the only living friend or relative of someone. This would be...challenging.


	20. Sette: Father Daughter Day

"The Doctor left us a gift he did not tell us of." - Deed

Well he's going to 'fess up.

**Sette: Father-Daughter Day**

"Father." Sette's inimitable, robotic tones. "I am glad to see you are well."

Jail raised an eyebrow at his youngest creation, in a way very reminiscent of Uno's own habit of doing the same. Like daughter, like father. "You are, now?"

"Very." Sette replied. "I have questions that I need to be answered, and if you were not well, I might not be able to answer them."

Toneless, always toneless, but someone had apparently taught Sette basic courtesy since last Jail had seen her. He sighed. "So they bring you here, to show me that my defeat is now truly total. That last remaining loyal servant I have is in fact a psychotic wreck simply waiting to explode in my face. I am indeed alone." Sardonic amusement. Jail's maniac glee in remission; solitary confinement did that to a man.

"No, father." Sette replied. "Do you really believe there is anything to be gained, playing mind games with you in such a fashion? I merely have questions that only you can answer."

Jail noted that he'd been called father for the second time. It was an affectation not present in any of his cyborgs younger than Cinque. Perhaps in her loyalty to Tre, Sette had picked up that particular bit of the speech patterns of the elder cyborg? Jail hadn't seen either of them in a long time. More than two years, now. "And what questions are those?"

"We, Sein, Deed, Tre and myself, have recently engaged very similar people. Who have blue wing tattoos in common. Exposure to these tattoos caused hardcoded commands in our implants to surface, directing us, in Sein's case against her will, to destroy the threat. You never told us about these." Sette tilted her head slightly, the bad impression of Tre's confused expression. "By experiment, we have established that it applies to all of your daughters. But not Ginga and Subaru." Sette leaned forward. "You never told us of these."

Jail leaned back and smiled. "I thought they were superfluous, honestly. I assume you are aware of the name, now. Huckebein."

"We are. Searches of Bureau records are ongoing but negative so far." Sette replied. "What is this about?"

"You could ask Regius." Jail replied.

Sette shook her head slowly. "Father, please. I know you have no love for the Bureau, but if not for them, for us. For me. I have never betrayed your trust, fought against you. You trained me. You raised me as your daughter."

"You wish me to believe you have some personal stake in this Sette? Come now, I'm not that fool-" Jail broke off.

Sette was, beyond his ability to comprehend, crying. "Father. They killed a whole settlement. They wiped out the family of my only friend. I am all she has left. And now they are running around out there doing Sankt Kaiser knows what and _I need to stop them_. Help me."

"And you want justice." Jail said. His voice was softer now. It lacked the maniac quality that usually marked it, but the fight was not quite beaten out of him yet.

"Justice is an artificial concept. It does not exist in nature. It's not something I _feel, _father. Someone hurt my friend, killed her family. _Vengeance_, retribution, that is something I feel." Sette replied. "Will you help me, father?"

Jail leaned back, silently. He considered for over three minutes, and then began to speak, slowly. "The Huckebein. Regius came to me, oh, decades ago. I wasn't interested in cybernetics at all, then, did you know? Artificial mages. I had just started studying AMF effects. He told me that he had something he needed a counter to. A bit of skin, a finger, from the first of the Huckebein. I spent three years trying to come up with a way to fight them with mages. Three years, stretching the bounds of all magical knowledge. I spent three whole years and I failed." Bitter. That was a new emotion from Jail, one he had never displayed in his whole life. The closest he ever got to showing bitterness was sardonicism.

"And then, Subaru and Ginga surfaced. Ridiculous, useless high-cost solutions to a problem already solved. Artificial mages were cheaper and easier to make. Everyone else dismissed them as an interesting but ultimately useless experiment. But in them...in them, I saw my answer. If I had to fight mages who could nullify magic, then I needed something to fight a mage, without being a mage. You, and all your sisters, were built to fight the Huckebein, Sette. Later I changed my plans, of course. But I always knew I would still need you one day, to perform that task."

"The Huckebein are immune to magic-based offense. Their starship as well. You will need mass weapons to harm them. The Bureau keeps a small number, railgun weapons in a rifle format, in case they are ever forced to send personnel into a non-magic environment. I believe they call them M9s. I believe you have already conducted some familiarization and training with them while you still worked for me. A full training and familiarization course is built into your mental implants, it seemed wise for you to be able to use them if needed. Codeword release system, I will need a holoterminal to write it down. Shoot for the head. The Huckebein regenerate nonlethal injuries almost instantly." Jail shrugged. "I wish you luck, Sette. And...should it ever come to your attention of anything I can do for the others...please let me know."

Sette reached across the table, took Jail's hand, and kissed it softly. It represented the first physical contact he had felt in...more than three years. The first truly friendly, affectionate contact he had ever known. Then Sette turned away and left.

Jail stared at the silent, brooding cameras in the corners, that watched him every day, all day. They watched him eat, watched him sleep, watched him use the toilet. _I have not been the father I should have. But I can learn. That's why you locked me in here, isn't it? I can learn._

_Damn you all, **I can learn**. _


	21. Sette, Cinque, Nove: Contemplation

**Sette, Cinque, Nove: Contemplation**

She had just received permission to use the information she had been given, to go off on this quest of hers. Revenge, as she'd told her father. Sette examined her hands, and asked herself if she had meant it.

It was true enough, in many ways. Justice _was_ an artificial concept, one that did not exist naturally, but that had to be imposed through the strictures of a society. This did not make it less valuable, but it did mean that she had spoken at least one truth to her father. Justice wasn't something one _felt_. Emotions might surround it, indignation, satisfaction, desire, frustration, but justice was just a concept. That was the point of it. Free of emotion, able to pursue unfettered what was best for all.

That was probably why justice was so hard to put into practice. It wasn't very satisfying.

Sette looked down before Thoma could tug her sleeve. "Sorry, Thoma. Just...thinking." The boy didn't appear disturbed by her monotone; seemed to take it in stride. It was a better reaction than anyone else she'd known. Even her own sisters usually found her a bit disturbing.

"About what your dad said?" Isis asked.

"Not quite." A quaver. This emotion thing was starting to come more easily to her. Sette fought it and won. This needed cold, not warmth. "What I want and what must be done are in alignment, but I am not sure I should enjoy this." The Huckebein were immune to normal magic. That meant normal sealing spells, and maybe even normal AMF. Their Dividers, according to Jail's files on them, acted in a very similar fashion to the Devices of the Wolkenritter. They couldn't be disarmed when they could simply call the weapon to hand again across any kind of barrier or distance.

And because the Huckebein could not be made safe and contained, and could not be ignored, they must be destroyed. Sette wanted to destroy them, too. But that was new for her, and Sette was fairly sure that actually _wanting_ to kill people was A Bad Thing.

Familiar faces. Many familiar faces. Her sisters were here. All of them, save for Due and Quattro. "Sisters." Sette acknowledged. "All of you at once, as well?"

"You have a rather large family..." Thoma observed.

"She does." Cinque agreed from the front rank. "Hello Sette. You did not really think we would let you do this alone, did you?"

Sette paused, and nodded slowly. "It is my battle."

Uno shook her head. "We are your sisters, Sette. Your battles, your enemies, are ours. We will not allow you to do this alone."

"Sisters together." Nove agreed.

"Sisters forever." Deed finished.

For the second time that day, Sette was moved to tears and she could not explain why.

* * *

"Sette." Cinque said softly. "You wanted to see me?"

"I do." Isis and Thoma would not separated from Sette for more than a few minutes except to sleep. She had grown used to the two of them surprisingly quickly. "I require some...guidance, Cinque."

"Why ask me?" Cinque said. She'd _apparently_ aged quite a bit since Sette had last seen the fifth Number. Cinque could now pass for at least twelve, maybe even fourteen. "Normally you look to Tre, or you could ask Uno if Tre wasn't authoritative enough."

"I suspect Tre would be disturbed by the question, and Uno would struggle to answer." Sette replied. "Cinque, this is something that I want to do. Not because it is the right thing. Because I find that I want to kill the Huckebein, particularly Cypha. What does this mean?"

"It makes you human, and a fighter." Cinque replied. "Anyone who had seen the colony would have wanted to put a stop to that. You, being trained to fight, can do that most reliably by killing those responsible. If you reacted any _other_ way, that would be the abnormal thing." Cinque wasn't entirely sure of that, but she had long experience in reassuring her sisters despite their not being totally wrong. The important thing was to give them time to learn and understand.

"Besides, I want to." Nove said from her doorway.

"Why?" Sette asked, ignoring the rudeness of eavesdropping, or simply not familiar with the concept of rudeness. One option was as likely as the other.

Nove shrugged. "We were born for this, Sette. It is our purpose in life to one day go out and kill the Huckebein. It's what the Doctor made us. And the sooner the Huckebein are dead, the sooner _I _get to decide who and what I am rather than being programmed for a specific thing."

"Nove has a valid point." Cinque agreed. "This is the last thing we need ever do, directly or indirectly, because of the Doctor. If you wish to be free of him, or to do him one last service, this is the way."

"Thoma was very interested in what it's like to be one of us." Nove said offhandedly. "He was asking a lot of questions before we made him go to bed."

"That's awful." Cinque observed.

"To be stronger, faster, tougher, even smarter. To never grow old. And yet to retain everything that would make you human in the eyes of anyone else who was not _told_ what you are." Sette might be rebuking her older sister, it was hard to tell. "We are not monsters, Cinque, and we were no more born monstrous than anyone else. There is very little about us that is actually objectionable."

"I gotta agree with Sette." Nove replied. "There are plenty of reasons people would _want_ to be like us, Cinque. It may not be very practical, but that doesn't make it wrong."

Cinque backed down from the point without a fight. It wouldn't help. "Doesn't change the fact that only the Doctor really knows how it's done."

"So far true." Sette agreed. "But I would not bet against Uno, either. She has assisted with the procedure a number of times after all. Given a reason, I believe she could find a way." A brief pause. "I am grateful to you, for coming with me...I thought Tre would, but not all of you."

"Like Uno said, we are your sisters." Cinque replied.

"None of us is ever alone. Not while the rest of us can reach her." Nove said softly. "Remember that, Sette."

"I will."


	22. What We Were Born To Do

I admit nothing regarding the M-9 resembling weapons from a certain video game series. Arnage's reacted Divider is based on concept art I've seen of it; to my knowledge, she hasn't actually shown it or used it Force yet.

**What We Were Born To Do**

They called her _Eagle_, mainly because it had been the only name they could get everyone to agree on. Though she looked like a Bureau warship executed at three-quarters scale and made of lego bricks, she was not one. They had merely helped. _Eagle_ represented the combined efforts of twenty-six different countries on Earth, the planet's first space warship, currently being borrowed by the Bureau.

After all, the Huckebein had a starship. And it was immune to Bureau weapons. But not to the cold, hard physics behind Earth's nuclear weapons. _Eagle_ was here today to demonstrate this in the most direct and graphic way possible.

"Thirty seconds to reversion. Stand by to cast off." _Eagle_ was being towed through the Dimensional Sea. Though she had a Bureau reactionless drive, and was actually quite sprightly in normal space because she massed less than a third of the N-class cruiser the drive had been designed for, the Bureau hadn't been willing to part with a Dimensional Sea drive. They also hadn't sent a full Bureau cruiser. It was fully expected that the Bureau ship would be attacked and destroyed by the Huckebein's starship. During that time, however, _Eagle_ would be getting weapons lock and launching her payload of three hundred and fifty nuclear-tipped missiles.

"Reverting, cast off."

* * *

Stella sighed. A courier with a tow, not even a real warship. Destroying it took about thirty seconds and was utterly boring, no challenge and no sport. Then she turned her attention to the tow.

She had ignored it for its low power readings and lack of wards before. But the tow was maneuvering, quite rapidly, under its own power. That got her attention. A moment later she spotted the inbound missiles._ Oh no.  
__

* * *

_

Four and a half seconds later, the first of a hundred nuclear-tipped missiles impacted the Huckebein ship's wards while it tried to get away. Stella had tried desperately to evade, but the range and time were too short. And the Bureau had helped design the missiles too, making them far quicker and more maneuverable than purely Earth-designed weapons.

The Huckebein ship's wards broke on missile seventy-five, and after seventy-six and seventy-seven, the rest went after large pieces of debris or detonated themselves when it was clear there was no target left. Launch waves two and three were canceled. _Eagle_'s crew cheered the first spacecraft-to-spacecraft kill in Earth's history. Their first steps into a larger, more dangerous universe had not been faltering and uncertain, but decisive.

"Quiet on the bridge! Damage reports." _Eagle_ was a thrown-together ship, and firing a third of her main armament had probably broken _something_, "Signal to ground team: the special job is done."

* * *

"_Eagle_ confirms destruction of the Huckebein's starship." Uno said. "Courier was destroyed, but the crew got off."

All business now, Tre nodded. "Check your weapons."

Each of the cyborgs, even Cinque, carried a new weapon. The M-9 Combat Railgun Carbine was the Bureau's personal weapon of last resort, mainly because it was always, and only, lethal. The M-9 was an ugly, blocky thing in white and grey, with a bullpup design and a snub-nosed barrel poking out of the front end. Each of the cyborgs also carried their Inherent Equipment as well. Dieci and Wendi kept their new weapons slung over one shoulder to handle their own heavy guns. The M-9s were rifle-sized for most of the younger Cyborgs, and Cinque looked faintly ridiculous with hers, but they worked well for Tre, Uno, and Sette.

There was one new addition: Uno also carried Due's old Inherent Equipment. It had been offered to Otto first, but didn't fit the younger cyborg's arm. It had been hoped that a smaller copy could be built for Otto before now, but it hadn't proved practical. Like a Device blade, the Piercing Nail had an automatically-adjusted molecular edge that could never dull and could cut any substance that wasn't thicker than it was long; unlike a Device blade, Due's Inherent Equipment was somehow performing the necessary calculations and alterations to the blade without resorting to extradimensional space for computers and material. The Bureau was finding the sheer variety of technical sophistication in Jail's work a great frustration.

Ahead, what had once been a settlement on this Unadministrated World. It had been gone long before the first Bureau ship had visited this place, but the mud brick and adobe resisted the arid elements of this place well. The settlement had once been a bustling place, more of a small city than a town. Here, Jail had known and conveyed to his daughters, the Huckebein would always return at intervals of about six months.

_Otto, Wendi, Dieci. Bombardment when we get within two hundred meters of the buildings. I want the first two rows of them gone by the time we get there. _Tre ordered via the radio implants. She raised one arm and swept it forward and down in the signal to advance.

* * *

"They knew we would come." Fortis observed calmly. "They knew, somehow, that we come here every few months."

"They killed Stella and Karen!" Deville replied. "They can't go unavenged, Fortis. We have already let the killers of one member of our family escape."

"Those two are here, Deville." Fortis replied. "Out there on the field. They are coming to us. Patience. Arnage, be read to engage them when they approach close. Pay special attention to the leader. Take your positions everyone."

Veyron looked out and felt unease. Their opponents had been waiting for them, waiting to _trap_ them. Fortis might present himself calmly. But Stella and Karen were dead, as was the original bearer of his Divider. The impossible, the impermissible, had happened, and all Fortis' plotting and Deville's thirst for vengeance could not change that.

"Arnage." Veyron said softly as they passed out of the building. "Be careful."

"Pah. They frighten you, Veyron? I thought you had more balls than that." Cypha commented from behind the two.

Veyron turned and fixed Cypha with a stare. "I see the one who frightened you into _running away_ out there Cypha. They came here to kill us, and they have clearly brought weapons equal to the task if they could kill Stella and Karen. There is danger here even for us."

* * *

The Huckebein were at least a little canny. They had realized that the first line of buildings, and the one after that, were simply deathtraps in the face of the cyborgs' heavy weapons. After their destruction, the advance had slowed as the Combat Cyborgs moved through the rubble.

_Contacts. I see at least two of them._ Dieci warned.

_Suppressive fire. Dieci, mark the target. _Tre replied. Seven of the M-9s came up, but it was Dieci's cannon that spoke, taking the second story off a building. Otto removed the rest of it a moment a later, while Wendi swept a long-duration beam attack across the buildings in front of them over the heads of her sisters, going for second and third stories.

The next sound was the rip-roar of Arnage returning fire with her Divider's Reacted gatling form. Tre, the target, seemed to somehow flow through the spaces between bullets to Arnage, impossibly fast even for a mage. A moment later at least three of the other Combat Cyborgs engaged Arnage. The M-9s were much softer than rip-roar, but the individual thunderclaps of each round leaving the barrel at high-hypersonic speeds bled together into a single long peal of thunder. Arnage fired off the missiles from the other hand and fled a moment before the Combat Cyborgs firing at her found her position and reduced the wall she was hiding behind to dust and matchsticks.

Nove saw a missile coming in her direction and leveled both arms, filling the sky with fire from both Gun Knuckle and the M-9. It was a slim hope, but better than nothing. Otto was looking out for her sisters, though, and a moment after the missiles launched Ray Storm swept them from the air.

Wendi was sweeping another attack across the second stories when she stumbled and looked at her chest in annoyance. She was bleeding, and it hurt surprisingly a lot to get shot even for her. But the plating replacing her ribcage had stopped it with ease. A moment later she had traced the single shot back to where it had come from, the Doctor's implants and a simple fire-finder program proving their worth. "I.S. Aerial Cannon." she murmured, unleashing a full-power blast at the offending Huckebein. She had a moment to recognize the glint of glass in her sight picture before her blast washed away that part of the building.

_Cinque, Nove, suppress left. Sette, Sein, suppress right. _Tre ordered. The radio implants were a godsend; there was no way they could have given orders verbally or over non-implanted radios in this din, particularly not as Arnage's Divider rip-roared again, a sound like tearing cloth amplified thousands of times.

This burst wasn't aimed as well, a simple attempt to suppress the three cyborgs with the heavy weapons. It fell short, and Dieci started to swing her weapon around, prompting Arnage to change firing position again moments before Dieci blew her last one to vapor.

Uno reached the area where Dieci and Otto had blasted the building out of existence a minute ago. Deed was moments behind her, hammering rounds from her M-9 into the nearest still-standing building just like Uno.

At that moment Deville rose up out of the wreckage, cut, bloody, screaming his rage. Neither of the Combat Cyborgs could get their M-9s on him fast enough, but Uno blocked the first blow from his Divider with her new Inherent Equipment, Due's old gear more than up to task. Then Cinque was on the bigger man, fending off his blows as she swarmed up him, stabbing. Deville tried to slice her head in half with his Divider, but Cinque caught the blade barehanded.

It turned out that just as Huckebein could cancel magic, so the native AMF built into Cinque's beloved jacket would cancel the Huckebein's own abilities. The Divider lost its edge under AMF, just as a Device would. It could cut Cinque's skin, but it could not cut her cybernetics, and moments later she was shoving a knife into Deville's eyes with a whispered "Rumble Detonator" and leaping off him.

The resulting explosion was messy, to say the least. Tre flicked her head, getting a bit of brain matter off her cheek, sweeping her weapon back and forth, then she spotted Fortis stumbling out the ruined shell of a building, his characteristic glasses shattered, half his clothes burned away from his body by Wendi's earlier shot.

Fortis was clearly not aware of his surroundings, perhaps not even capable of reacting to them on any level at the moment. Surely if he'd been even capable of instinctual reaction he'd at least have had the sense to get down rather than stumble about upright. But the mission orders had been clear, and so was Tre's sight picture. A ten-round burst dropped Fortis without much of a head left.

Tre felt a moment's satisfaction. The face of evil; not quite so threatening or awful when the face was gone. She swept her gaze and her weapon around, looking for other targets.

"Cypha!" Sette's cry cut through the rip-roar of Arnage firing again, this time rounds pattering off Wendi's and Dieci's cannons and actually injuring Wendi again, though not enough to put her out of action. The youngest cyborg brought her weapon up towards where she had spotted the distinctive hair of the Huckebein whose name she knew, and Sette held down the trigger, spewing forth hundreds of rounds before the gun overheated in her hands. Sette ignored the sizzle when her finger brushed the barrel as she discarded the M-9, accelerating in low-altitude flight.

A half-dozen of Sette's IE blades appeared around the cyborg even as Cypha turned at bay. Cypha was reacting her Divider, all too aware that being unable to fly she'd not be able to escape her tormentor. Sette didn't slow or even try to stop, flying directly into Cypha with a blade held out in front of her. Sette had made it well past Mach 1 by the time she made contact, and she weighed three times what a normal woman of her size and apparent age would. The impact was devastating, shattering both the IE blade Sette was holding and the larger of Cypha's two Divider blades. The two went flying, crashing through at least three different walls; no mean feat since they had been at least ten meters from any intact wall at impact.

Cypha had turned to try and flee again as Sette struggled to her feet. But the effort the Huckebein made was futile as Sette's remote-controlled Inherent Equipment blades boxed Cypha in and struck. The first blows would have been _eventually_ lethal, but were healing in seconds. They were only the first, as Sette watched dispassionately as the IE blades struck again and again, overwhelming Cypha's ability to regenerate, forcing her to fall to her knees, to bleed and bleed. The constant hacking eventually reduced Cypha to something with a distinctly unpleasant resemblance to salsa over the course of several minutes.

And because she was a Huckebein, she lived through three of those minutes, long after any normal human or even mage would have died. Three long, screaming eternities of pain and suffering, begging for death, for mercy, for anything. The resemblance to the cries of Cypha's victims was utterly lost on her, of course. But not on Sette, who found it most fitting.

* * *

"Arnage!" Veyron caught her shoulder, stopping her from firing at Sette. "This isn't going to work, you idiot. They'll kill us. We need to _go._"

"But Fortis, and Deville..."

Veyron shook her. "They are _dead_, Arnage, and you will be too if you don't come with me."

* * *

No contact, no return fire, for the last two minutes, just the thunder of the M-9s and the sound of buildings falling when exposed to concentrated fire from them or a single shot from the one the heavier-armed sisters. _Cease fire!_ Tre ordered.

The silence was deafening. The air was heavy, hot and still, and Tre could hear her sisters all breathing. The slow, calm-sounding breaths helped her bring her own surging adrenaline back under control, even though she knew they were simply breathing that way because their implants were governing their bodily functions at the moment. Uno contacted _Eagle_, and had the Earth ship put her through to the Bureau cruiser that had now joined it in orbit. "_Uhlan_, give me a scan for mage signatures."

The answer came back thirty seconds later. "_Uhlan_ detects no one else for a hundred kilometers."

Tre nodded and passed the word. _Uhlan has no contact besides us. Reform, but be careful. I don't think we accounted for all of them here._


	23. Nove: Peace Is Not Tranquility

This was unexpectedly short. I guess it just didn't need :words: to say.

**Nove: Peace Is Not Tranquility**

"We blew it." Nove slammed a fist into the wall. It was the designated-fist-into-wall spot in the house, a reinforced concrete wall that even a Combat Cyborg would have trouble breaking. "We missed at least two of them."

"Where are you going?" Wendi asked. Even her maniac enthusiasm was diminished now, probably at least slightly because of the bandages on her arm and chest. She sounded about the same as anyone else would normally. It was as close to depressed as Wendi got.

"Away." Nove replied flatly, without turning her head or pausing.

* * *

She always made it here when she wandered. Sometimes it took only minutes, sometimes hours. But she always found herself staring at the front to Personal Combat Training Center, Ground Forces' equivalent of the large holographic training field RF6 had once used.

And always now, late at night when organized use of the PCTC was at a minimum. Or was it early morning? Nove shook that thought off, literally, with a quick angry shake of the head. She did not care, as she had never cared before.

She went through checkin in silence, her visible anger and disgust a shield against conversation or other interactions by the few others in the training center.

"Nove?" The other constant. Training for Combat Cyborgs and Wolkenritter both was difficult. Simulated enemies designed for other people had trouble threatening them. So both trained during off hours, at night or early mornings, when the computers could devote more processing cycles than normal to their opponents, make them smarter and faster.

But there were some things that simulated opponents just weren't good for. "Zafira. Busy?" Nove's tone said far more than her words.

"Not at all," the wolfman replied.

* * *

It wasn't that Nove could beat Zafira. She couldn't. She failed _horribly_ at it. Ten thousand years of practice at close combat and the natural strength and resilience of a Wolkenritter meant that Zafira could have fought off Nove while sleepwalking. And that, that was the point.

A left hook spun her around, a full circle, and she went down. It was not for the first time. Nove kicked off the mat, pushing with her elbows and bringing herself back upright in a way a normal human would have found impossible. Even if they could have pushed with their elbows hard enough to get to a standing position, they could never have managed to get the force just right to deposit them on their feet rather than their face.

Nove threw a rapid series of punches, aimed at Zafira's head and shoulders. The wolfman deflected some, dropped his shoulders a few centimeters to miss others. Nove's leg came up, Jet Edge firing its namesake jets to give the blow more force, only for Zafira to lean out of the way, grab her by that leg, and throw her into the ropes surrounding their practice area.

Fortunately they were simulated ropes rather than normal ropes, which would have probably broken. Nove rebounded, steadying herself on her feet, and came at Zafira again.

Try again. Fail again. It wasn't a matter of improving, it wasn't about getting better, getting closer to beating him. Nove was quite sure that she would never beat Zafira in a pure hand-to-hand fight, perhaps never beat him alone at all.

But she hated to lose. She hated it. She kept losing, kept getting back up, kept going back at him, knowing she would lose again, knowing winning wasn't possible and she was a fool for trying. That was the point.

Until finally, she landed face-down, for perhaps the fiftieth time, and simply lay there a moment, debating whether to get back up. No, no question. If she was still thinking about getting back up, she hadn't done this long enough.

Nove got up once again.

Finally, somewhere around one hundred, Nove landed on her front, head turned. She closed her eyes, and did not get back up again. After a minute or so, Zafira lowered his arms warily. "Nove?"

"I'm done." she replied from the mat, enjoying the cool on her cheek. "Thanks Zafs." The wolf shrugged, bemused. He didn't know what this was all about, and he never had. Nove never bothered to explain to him, but he had long since reached an acceptance that people did not have to make sense.

For Nove, it was about a different sort of acceptance. She was superhuman, but she had limits. She was stubborn, but she couldn't change everything. Stubborn and stupid, and sometimes she had to have the lesson that you can't beat everyone beaten into her too.

Now she'd be able to sleep.


	24. Veyron and Arnage: Flipside

You'd be correct to assume that's not the Signum we know and love. You _may not_ be correct, at this point, to assume so because this one's still reincarnating.

**Veyron and Arnage: Flipside**

"I'm hungry." Arnage said.

"Got any money then?" Veyron asked, amused. "You realize we can't just go around killing people for their food anymore. That is, unless you don't mind being found and having your head forcibly removed by those Bureau types."

There had been a time when they would have simply slain this whole settlement to loot their kitchens and pantries, but that had quite abruptly ended a week ago. They couldn't do that sort of thing anymore. They couldn't draw attention to themselves, not without risking their deaths.

It was hard. It was ridiculously, stupidly hard. The Eclipse had equipped them to fight and kill, and it _wanted _them to. Having people around them was like presenting a shark with blood. They _had_ to attack and kill, the instinct was simply that powerful. It was the only thing they'd ever done, the only thing they'd ever thought of doing. Doing anything else was madness of the first order.

Then their world had been turned upside down by the deaths of the rest of their family. Karen and Stella, purged in nuclear fire. Fortis and Deville, their heads blown off. And Cypha...Cypha, cut to shreds before their eyes in the most brutally literal sense of those words. It had all been done with such contemptuous ease, too. The reversal of roles had been total.

"I hope we meet one of them," Arnage said, thinking she'd picked up on Veyron's line of thought, "and then-"

"And then they kill us all on their own? Just one of them was enough to frighten Cypha into running away you know." Veyron sounded amused. "And what? You hate them for killing your family, Arnage? Killing people's families is what _we_ do. You're either too cynical or not cynical enough to be talking that level of cognitive dissonance."

"Does it not upset you at _all_?" Arnage asked, shocked.

"Arnage, only two things upset me." Veyron said patient. "One is stupidity. The other is when it rains. We managed to be very, very stupid. We all pretended we were a problem they couldn't solve. There weren't even ten of us against a vast, eighty-planet empire with millions of people and huge amounts of resources. If we ever gave them a reason to put an end to us, they clearly could and would find a way to do it. And we gave them that reason and they put an end to us." Veryon shrugged slowly. "And it was such a big surprise! What fools we all were. That upsets me quite a lot, but since I can't exactly go and urinate upon Karen's and Fortis' dead bodies I cannot express my displeasure."

Arnage sighed. Veyron was never going to be nice, but he was also very good at not being wrong. "So what do we do now?"

"We pretend to be normal, happy members of society, kill no one, work for money, and generally do not draw attention to ourselves." Veyron replied. "Because the Bureau will kill us if they find us."

"That's..." Arnage shook her head, trying very hard not to look towards the open end of the alley. "Veyron, can you even walk down the street? I can't. I have to stop, go down a side area where there aren't people."

Veyron nodded. "I know. I can't handle them for terribly long myself. But we have to learn. The alternative isn't one I'll acce-" He paused. "Hear that?"

"Screaming." Arnage sounded rather pleased and turned towards the noise, only for Veyron to catch her by the shoulder. "Veyron!"

"Remember what I said? We wait. We let it pass by." Veyron's tone, for once, was not mocking. Instead he was deadly serious. "You're going to have to train yourself not to run towards any sort of suffering, Arnage, or you're going to kill us both."

"But-" The problem was that Arnage genuinely enjoyed the suffering of others. Of course, considering what Eclipse had made her, this was making a virtue of necessity. The alternative, to hate the suffering of others, just wasn't going to work for a Huckebein. They were all about making people suffer and die.

Rain began to fall.

* * *

Two hours and much unpleasantness later, Arnage's self-control was being tested to the limit. They had been forced to seek shelter from the storm. Lightning fell in sheets, and there seemed to be more water than air. It was the worst storm either of them had ever seen.

And shelter meant company.

The Eclipse was there in the back of Veyron's mind, howling at him, _demanding_ that he slay all but Arnage. It had been doing so for the last two hours and showed no sign of slowing down. Eternal vigilance, the stakes his life. Some help the Eclipse was turning out to be.

Some of them had taken well to the Eclipse and some had not. For all the Eclipse had done for him, and it had done a great deal to make Veyron one of the most deadly beings in existence, it had also done something _to _him, to all of them, that Veyron could not forgive. It had stolen his sight.

He saw the world in shades of gray, no color, silhouettes only for anything that moved, graded by "threat" according to the Eclipse with a half-baked heads-up display integrated to his vision. And he hated it, he hated it so much. Once, a long time ago, he'd been able to see normally, and he remembered. He remembered red hair very clearly, the look of it, but he could not remember why. And Veyron suspected the Eclipse had taken something else from him, something important, perhaps something he'd once cherished. It had stripped those things that didn't make him a better killing machine.

It made the demands of the damned thing easy to fight, now that he had cause to try. All his bitterness, his rage, a decade in the making. Once he and Arnage had been like gods, utterly beyond the efforts of the mages they hunted, the gods to people who were godlike themselves. Now cast down. It was _easy_ to hate the Eclipse, the thing that had brought them here, unable to be normal when being normal was all that stood between him and death.

In the end, to his surprise, Veyron discovered that he didn't _want_ to be what he'd been made. That put him one-up on Arnage, who had never known a life outside the Huckebein. Arnage, who might manage to get them both killed yet. He thought of taking away her Divider, but knew that was a pointless exercise; it would buy him seconds if it did any good at all.

His reminiscing was interrupted with a crash as the door blew in.

Arnage spun first, high-strung, her muscles tensed, adrenaline flooding through her system from the presence of so much...well, there really wasn't another way to put it. She saw other people as _prey_. Not attacking them consumed most of her attention, and she envied Veyron his ability to speak normally, even carry on a conversation, where she had to focus so much she doubted she could form a sentence longer than five words.

_Threat Level Extreme_, screamed the Eclipse. This was an opponent that even the Eclipse thought had a chance of killing her. That was what kept Arnage from Reacting her weapon out reflex, the shock of something that the Eclipse thought was actually a threat to her. It hadn't even recognized the danger of those who'd wiped out her family.

Veyron moved forward. "You know it's pretty nasty out there. You going to fix that?"

They raised a weapon, a long blade, and chuckled. It was an earthy noise, a female's voice, full of menace. "You won't need it shortly."

Veyron recognized a threat when he heard one. After all, he was not unpracticed in making them himself. He called his Divider to hand, hearing the gasps of those behind him who hadn't guessed he was a mage. The irony, that he was about to fight to _save _people, whether he wanted to or not, was not lost on him. It also wasn't lost on him that this had to be a blades-only fight. The use of mass weapons that actually worked on mages would tip people off that _something _was very wrong. "Arnage. Blades."

He saw the woman shake her head and she advanced, wading in with powerful swings of a blade, a Device, it must be. It took contact with his Divider badly. She was skilled, and she liked to talk to his surprise. Reminded him of Cypha, in her threats and menacing talk.

And in not being quite as good as she thought she was, in persisting when it was clear the effort would end badly. She should have cut and left when it became clear her blade was wearing down under contact with his Divider, but she stayed.

Veyron drew back. "You would have been great friends with a sister of mine, but now I am afraid this must end." He was near the edge, giving in to the Eclipse-based instincts, and he knew he wouldn't stop with just her. He might have to fight Arnage to get her to back down after this. "However, curiousity compels me to ask," not really, but it was a question the Eclipse would never have let him ask if it had its way and he was all for frustrating it, "what's your name?"

She actually laughed. "I would think all of you cattle knew me by now. I am Signum-" It made no sense to him, but...

He ran her through, and then winced as her blade scored his side deeply. It didn't seem to have bothered her _at all_ that he'd run her through. The pain, though, did something he hadn't expected. For just a moment, his vision cleared.

He saw her face. She was smiling. "And I look forward to our next meeting."

Then he'd cut off her head, and his sight was reduced to the Eclipse's greyscale and silhouettes again. He turned and grabbed Arnage until he was sure she wasn't about to go utterly berserk. And he cursed the infection once more.


	25. Sette: Not How I Pictured It

Short bit is short.

**Sette: Not How I Pictured It**

It wasn't a situation Sette had ever expected to find herself in. A dedicated combat platform, as she thought of herself, she wasn't supposed to be a substitute parent. She didn't know how and she strongly suspected she would be very bad at it. Still...she liked Thoma and Isis, she liked mothering them in her own, inept way, with someone like Uno or Cinque to look over her shoulder and ensure she wasn't doing something horrifyingly wrong. What mainly bothered her now was whether such behavior was _fitting_.

The bottom line was that Sette did not consider herself a _person_. Most robotic of the sisters was a description she would readily answer to; how she actually thought of herself did not translate well. A tool, a robot, possessed of volition, but using in a very narrow fashion. There had been a time when she would have literallyanswered to "Killing Machine" but this was no longer true. The Bureau placed a high value on being able to do things nonlethally, even if that emphasis was starting to slip away under the pressure of war.

The real problem, as Sette saw it, was that there was so much _fear_ in her interactions with Isis, and especially with Thoma. Fear of failure, fear of mistakes; in Thoma's case, fear she might injure or kill him by accident. She wasn't like her eldest sisters, able to throttle her cybernetics down and keep them that way. It took continuous effort. Every time she interacted with a normal human, she had to consciously control herself or she could well break bones completely unintentionally. Fear wasn't something that should trouble a self-respecting combatant.

Unless this was part of what learning to not be a killing machine was like. Service to the Bureau had already required a broadening of her skillset. Sette, as the Doctor had created her, had been a one-trick machine. She knew how to kill things; quickly, efficiently. The Bureau had wanted much more of her.

It was no longer enough to be a machine. Sette had to be a _person. _Just how she was not entirely sure, though her time spent with Isis and Thoma was apparently very important to that. Certainly her sisters seemed to think so.

Sette was actually trying to smile at the moment, while she walked with Isis and Thoma, holding hands. Her smile did not look quite correct, she was still practicing. She'd come to suspect she'd never manage a smile that didn't disturb at least a few people, but Sette was a Combat Cyborg and not accustomed to failure. She had only failed once previously in her life and had no intention of doing so again.

"Sette." Thoma tugged on her hand. "What are you thinking?"

"About family, Thoma," she replied, giving his had a gentle, very gentle for a Combat Cyborg, squeeze. "New family."

Thoma smiled back at her, and she felt wrenched somehow, knowing that he still remembered his real family, that she was a replacement and not a very good one at that. But Thoma put a brave face on it. Braver than Isis even, who had only lost a foster family she had been with for a few months.

Sette didn't recognize the signs, but Uno, who was walking a short distance behind them, did. Thoma had lately grown colder, more distant. He appeared to be trying to consciously pattern himself after Sette and failing. No great surprise there; acting like Sette required understanding how Sette thought, and even her closest sisters didn't pretend to truly understand Sette's thoughts. There were holes in them, things Quattro had torn out, that they couldn't think into their own thought processes. Sette had concerns that made no sense and did not have concerns that seemed very basic.

Such as placing any sort of intrinsic value on her own life. Most of the time. Sette did not fear death; in a cynical moment Uno might argue this was because Sette had never actually lived. But Sette had accepted that her death would have a profoundly negative impact on others.

Starting with these two. Carefully, or at least carefully for her, she swept Isis and Thoma into a hug. Not because she much felt like it, but because it seemed the thing to do.

Late night at the home of Combat Cyborgs, according to Wendi whether they actually claimed to live there or not, the Nakajima residence. Subaru sat up with Isis and Sette both, keeping a watchful eye on Sette as she comforted Isis after a nightmare.

"Even nightmares fear something." Sette said, soft in volume if not in tone.

"What do nightmares fear?" Isis asked softly.

"Some nightmares fear little things, like daylight, someone who checks the closest before bed, a happy thought, a good day. Some only fear larger things, like soldiers, starships, Wolkenritter. The one thing they all fear most, though, is to be ignored." Sette paused a moment. "Your nightmares, for example, fear your sisters." Sette said. It was both a convenient truth in describing the fate of the Huckebein, and a literal truth in that Isis slept better accompanied by one of her sisters. That was how Jail's cyborgs regarded Isis; the youngest of the sisters, the little kid of the family.

Subaru leaned in. "The nightmares may win, sometimes, in your dreams. But why I do what I do is to keep them there. Whenever the nightmares try to be real, I am there to show people that nightmares are fakes and failures. They can't hurt anyone."

Isis looked up at Sette. "Is that why you do what you do?"

Sette paused, considering a moment, and then shook her head. "It is what I did for you, Isis, but no. Nightmares are stubborn and cannot be reasoned with, only threatened. I do the threatening. When nightmares have their own bad dreams, they dream of me or someone like me."

Sette worried that perhaps the rapt attention and total adulation seen on Isis' face was not the best thing that could have happened. Subaru was definitely a better figure to grow attached to. But who was she to deny a child? Sette had never been a child, and the knowledge that she would be an awful mother worked both ways. She did not know what was best either way.

So much uncertainty. At least on a battlefield Sette could judge the nature and the shape of danger. Here she could only be quietly lost.


	26. Otto: Of Children and Monsters

That is a sly reference to Einheart you detect. In much older drafts of the story that eventually became _In The Service_/_A Numbered Existence_, Einheart's first time attacking Vivio was taken as a serious attempt on Vivio's life and her bodyguards of the moment responded with lethal force. I have decided to save her for further use however.

**Otto: Of Children and Monsters**

It was no longer possible to have Vivio attend public schools. The problem was very simple: ever since she had acquired Wahrheit, it had become nearly impossible to keep people from pestering her about the Sankt Kaiser reincarnation deal. She had even been attacked by a classmate, to which Wahrheit had not responded well at all. The weapon was old, and it was powerful. Wahrheit had been created for a Captain of the Royal Guards at the height of the Belkan Empire's power. No one was entirely sure of what it was capable of, but they already knew the sword was essentially capable of operating unassisted; it could attack, defend, move, and even cast magic without being held.

This had alarmed a lot of people. Partially because they were capable of decision and hence in theory capable of deciding to turn on their masters, and partially because they were computers and could thus be tampered with to make them go nuts, Intelligent Devices were universally not capable of moving about on their own. To make matters worse, it was a Lost Logia on the level of the Book of Darkness. Wahrheit had been made for a Captain of the Royal Guards just before the fall of the Belkan Empire and incorporated technologies and techniques that no one alive understood.

Wahrheit also _really_ didn't like Vivio's new magic instructor, appearing to recognize them. Otto wasn't entirely sure about them either. Could you really trust a Reinforce? Even one with their magic sealed? Drei was softspoken and polite and if her seal broke able to devastate cities with her pinky finger. And Vivio and Wahrheit together were headed for that level pretty quick, and Vivio was still growing.

The weight of Otto's responsibilities rested uneasily on her shoulders. She felt small and frail in this company of city-killers and people who could fight starships unassisted. And all too prone to error. Teaching Vivio, watching Drei. It wasn't enough to be _just_ superhuman for a job like this. You needed omniscient gods for this sort of thing, proof against error and mistakes and failure.

It didn't help Sein didn't seem to feel the pressure, or at least feel it the same way. Then again, it would be very like Sein to not contemplate the costs of failure. Sein was the antithesis of Jail or Uno, a means and not a results person.

Drei was far too nice to be a planet-destroying superweapon. Otto had not yet once heard Drei raise her voice or even seem angry, despite the great restrictions placed on her. The Reinforce clone had a measured way of responding to things, but not one that gave the impression of care; Drei considered the possibilities and then did whatever she felt like. This just _happened_ to be usually polite and soft-spoken.

On occasion, usually about the time people started to think Drei was a really nice and kind person who'd never do anything wrong and never hurt anyone, she'd say something that reminded them she had presided over the destruction of planets. Otto halfway suspected Drei did it on purpose, that the Reinforce clone actually _enjoyed_ confusing people with her contrasts.

There were ugly truths in life. One of the ugliest, as far as Otto was concerned, was that Vivio had to learn to fight at this age. She was not unaware of the irony; Otto herself had learned to fight from the first moment she was conscious. Otto had accepted her lot in life; she was a Combat Cyborg, the name explained it. Fighting was what she did, what she was good at.

Vivio would probably be good at it too, someday, if she took after her mamas. But Vivio could also be good at other things. She was a clone of the Sankt Kaiser; she had the ability within her to do anything her forebear had done, and the Sankt Kaiser had been many things to many people: a solider, stateswoman, bringer of order, creator of hope, revolutionary, redeemer, life to the dying and death to guilty. Vivio could be so much more than a fighter.

But only if she lived to be. And New Belka's known hate for the Sankt Kaiser meant they'd almost certainly attack Vivio if they learned about her. The good news was that with Wahrheit, and it's ability to turn her back into her adult mode, Vivio actually had a chance to defend herself if a group of Rogue Wolkenritter came knocking.

Learning to fight meant learning to cope with fighting. "That first time, how did you feel?" Vivio asked. Her own first combat was rather hazy in Vivio's memory, which was probably just as well for Vivio's development as a sane and well-adjusted person.

Otto paused. "I felt...sick. Ashamed, honestly." She'd never talked about it before and the words poured out regardless of the fact she was dimly aware she should not be burdening Vivio with this confession. "I am not sure if it grew easier with time, or if it was the nature of those I fought, that mattered."

"It does get easier." Drei put in. "It can become too easy, if you let it." And that would be the other ugliest truth, that Drei existed. It was perhaps cynical of Otto, but even in a very imperfect world things like Drei, planet-killing magical abominations, should never exist. It came down to the fact that Otto simply could not conceive of a situation in which something like a Reinforce was _necessary_. Maybe _convenient_, but doing something because it was easiest was a hell of a way to go about a topic like destroying planets.

Not that Otto disliked Drei personally. It was more of the concept of her. "Sein?"

"Busy." Sein replied distractedly, watching the group of other students of the church passing about thirty feet away. The other Combat Cyborg took her duties as a bodyguard very seriously since Deed had left. It had been she who had pried the other child off Vivio when the fight broke out, and Sein had not done so terribly gently either. "The classes shouldn't be out at this point in time, and I didn't recognize that teacher."

"We haven't had any new ones." Otto observed worriedly. They were Combat Cyborgs. They _always_ remembered a face. "Illusion?"

"A very good one if so." Drei put in. "I could even smell grass on their shoes. Illusions don't do that normally." Actually, they didn't do that at all. At least that Otto knew. It was, she reflected, quite possible that Drei had encountered illusory magic no one else currently living had ever seen. It was also possible Drei hadn't smelled anything and was lying, but if they were up to that point then Otto considered this job many different kinds of doomed already, and dying would be a blessing compared to witnessing first hand the consequences of failure.

Otto shook it off. Things weren't yet bad. That she knew about, anyways.

* * *

Out in public with these two made Otto's skin crawl. Because other people's skins crawled, mainly. Drei either could not nor would not make any effort to disguise herself, and the tall silver-haired visage of a Reinforce was among the most easily and widely recognized people in the universe at the moment.

With the minor problem with all that recognition was that it frequently caused momentary panic, considering the Rogue Wolkenritter problems. Otto caught a flicker of motion and a flash out the corner of her eye and started to turn.

"_Arnage, no!"_

Stabbing a sealed mage with a Divider would probably have still been a decent idea, if it had been most other mages. They wouldn't have been able to get over the stabbing part to make use of the unsealing part. Not this one. It took a lot more than getting stabbed just once to stop a Wolkenritter.

Black wings unfurled from Drei's back, a perfect replica of Hayate's own black wings, which Otto had seen once or twice. Drei's Barrier Jacket was a high-collared vest and long pants to armored boots, all in an ash grey. The vest appeared to be of a thick, hard-wearing fabric. The pants, too, suggested heavy material, not form-fitting but intended to provide some protection to go with mobility.

"That," Drei said crossly to Arnage, "was not appreciated." The next stab glanced off her Barrier Jacket. The Dividers cut connections between Linker Core and spell or construct, and so Barrier Jackets normally were no defense. But trying to cut the flow of magic from a Reinforce was like trying to cut a hole in the ocean with a butter knife. It didn't work, and it was profoundly dumb to try.

Arnage's bloodlust might not care, but Otto did, and approximately seven seconds after the first stab the Combat Cyborg hit Arnage like the slightly more than 113 kilograms worth of titanium alloy Otto was. The impact of a simple bull rush at speeds closer to cars than people broke several of Arnage's bones and sent her flying. A second Huckebein appeared, crouching over the first, as Otto advanced.

They had made a mistake, letting some of the Huckebein get away. "I can't let you do this." The second Huckebein seemed much more controlled. "You killed the rest of my family, and I'm pretty okay with that actually. But Arnage is all I've got left, cyborg. Over my dead body."

Both of them, here, now, the mistake easily corrected. Otto grinned savagely. "That is acceptable."

A hand came to rest on Otto's shoulder.

Otto turned sharply, expecting Sein. Instead she confronted a person who could not exist. The features were Vivio's adult form, but the eyes, the expression, were someone else's entirely. The sheer, inflexible will of the stranger hit Otto like a physical object. She had to avert her eyes from theirs; holding their gaze produced a distinctly unpleasant sensation, like being drowned, Otto's sense of self feeling like it was slipping away in the face of the stranger's brutally focused will.

The voice was not Vivio's either, older, more mature, with a confidence and an utter conviction Vivio did not have. Even Jail at his most maniac had never sounded so assured; it was as if the stranger was pronouncing the fundamental nature of reality, not the way she saw things. "You are a knight of Belka, and you will not strike a man who has not raised a hand against you."

She had been in her grave nearly four generations. But across the years, in spite of death itself, this could be no other but Olivie.

When Otto turned again, the two Huckebein were gone.


	27. Ginga: Uneasy Lies The Head

Despite the best efforts of Windows reinstalls and the like, we're still going.

**Ginga: Uneasy Lies The Head**

"Sir. Lieutenant Ginga Nakajima reporting as ordered." She came to attention and snapped a salute.

Her father regarded her coolly. The show of respect was, in fact, the exact opposite. One of the first standing orders of First Regiment was that it was a working command, and operated under combat conditions. Utilities at all times; no saluting. Ginga had just quite deliberately been insubordinate to her commanding officer's face. What Genya Nakajima didn't know, and it considerably bothered him since he felt he knew his daughter well, was _why_.

Genya did not stand, did not salute, and did not give the "at ease" command. A number of calculated insults, but failing to return the salute was the most serious; in many ways it was the most blatant show of disrespect for a subordinate possible, far worse than simple verbal abuse. Instead, he gave Ginga leave to speak with a silent wave of his hand.

"Sir, I respectfully request relief from my assignment." Ginga said. There was a note of uneasiness in her voice. The insult had not been lost on her. Genya Nakajima was a man of seemingly infinite patience, not a screamer or one given to displays of anger. He lacked the utter confidence and convinction that Chrono exuded or the infinite dynamism of his own commander, Hans von Luck. Instead Genya was almost paternal, and his only ruthlessness, if it could be called that, was a willingness to burden his subordinates with his unwavering faith in their abilities. Ginga was not the first to find that burden heavy.

Genya gave no sign that the request surprised him. He regarded his daughter for a moment in silence, then spoke. "Do go on, Lieutenant."

"Sir, I respectfully submit that I am not the best officer available to-"

"Stop right there Lieutenant." Genya said. "You are the only current officer I have with any experience in both training and Combat Cyborgs. I'm having to pull in Corporals and Sergeants to command most of my teams with a promotion to Senior Sergeant. You are the _only _officer available." Genya regarded her silently a moment. "But then, that's it, isn't it?"

He glanced at Teana, hovering in a corner and looking like she really didn't want to be there. "Lieutenant Lanster, you are dismissed. Shut the door on your way out." A momentary pause. "And don't listen at it."

Teana's eyebrows went up, and she reacted as if professionally insulted. But Genya had made his point, and she kept people away from the office.

* * *

Genya waited a full seven seconds after the door closed. "This isn't about your belief that someone could do it better, is it? You think you can't do it. There is only one reason you would request relief before training is even started. You think you've cracked." Ginga flinched but did not deny the accusation. Genya continued in the same voice. "You display none of the outward symptoms of such, but as you are a Combat Cyborg this doesn't necessarily mean anything. Your failure to get into the fight for Cranagan a few months back, is that a symptom or a cause?"

Ginga attempted to answer him, not entirely sure what she was trying to say. It came out as a strangled squeak. She'd forgotten her commanding officer was also her father, briefly, and that attempting to misdirect them carried more than the usual issues.

"Ginga, go to the medics. I want a full pysch workup. I suspect it will tell me you are fully sane, but I suspect you need to hear that too." Genya phrased it as an order, but issued it as fatherly advice; not unusual even for those who weren't his daughters.


	28. Over The Top: Subaru

**Over The Top: Subaru**

Boarding action. Subaru wasn't happy about it. She knew how badly the boarding of the _Invincible_ had gone. Successful at the cost of nearly fifty percent causalities didn't scan as actually "successful" to her.  
In truth, this whole assignment upset her. She didn't think of herself as a soldier; she didn't want to be a soldier. And here she was commanding Team Two, Special Personnel And Tactics, eight Combat Cyborgs of roughly her own age, as a soldier.

They were all equally inexperienced. Subaru had, by far, seen the most combat. Most of the rest were Ground Forces and had seen their first real action in Cranagan, where they'd been badly injured and hence become eligible for Combat Cyborg conversion. There was one bright spot, and that was the assignment to her team of another experienced Combat Cyborg: Deed, who had proved a tower of quiet strength. Another thing to upset Subaru too; she didn't like that she had a group that was as green as grass. Their training exercises had been hard, very hard, to toughen them up and put them under serious pressure in the hopes that any unresolved issues would surface now. That worried her too; she thought that the nose-to-the-grindstone might have chipped their edge, rather than honed it.

She had too many worries, too many questions, for someone about to lead soldiers in combat. And Subaru knew it.

Maybe this was why Ginga wanted to be removed from command of Team One.

"Thirty seconds to teleport."

* * *

Combat Cyborgs were unnerving to watch in action. There was a subtle wrongness to them when they moved and fought in groups, something that could not be immediately pinned down. Most people eventually put it down to their silence, but it went a little deeper.

Because of their radio implants, they could pass information, give orders, and execute complex plans without appearing to communicate at all. Not by voice, hand signal, or even looking at each other. Even mages had to talk usually; telepathy took time and a degree of concentration that didn't lend itself to active combat.

_Clear._

_Keep moving._ Subaru replied. It had taken a lot of getting used to, this mode of communication. But she had to admit it made them quicker and less likely to garble it.

_Sergeant. You need to see this._ Deed, and to Deed's credit she did need to see it.

They were kids. Most of them couldn't be older than Vivio. All kids, looking up at them with big, frightened kid eyes. At least a hundred, maybe more.

Didn't necessarily mean anything. Kids could be mages too. Nine-year-old Nanoha could have easily blown the crap out of Subaru at her current age. Fortunately, nobody here looked to be a nine-year-old Nanoha. Confused, frightened; no determined, no angry, nothing to set off alarm bells.

_Seal that hatch._ Subaru ordered. _We don't have time for anything else. I'll update command._

They pressed on, through endless antiseptic white corridors. It seemed forever from their perspective, but it was not; barely even five minutes at the speed they moved through the ship from their entry point, guided from afar as the Bureau cruisers herding this ship around by getting in its way or adopting collision courses to force it to change heading. The longer it went on, the more accurate the scans from the surrounding ships got, the better their directions were.

Just short of the bridge, Subaru poked her head into a compartment and immediately pulled it back as a large tripod-mounted gun with a long barrel and a very small muzzle diameter turned her way.

"Are they crazy?" Subaru asked no one in particular, startled enough to actually speak. A railgun might pierce the ship's hull and kill everyone in the compartment. Even a Combat Cyborg needed oxygen.

"That is entirely possible." Deed replied.

_Assault, flank both sides, on three. One, two, three._ They stormed into the compartment, spreading wide before going for the railgun. There wasn't that much room for the operator to react with. He got off a burst, but it was too late; they were already on him.

It still clipped the team's junior member, Sylvia Laurens, but didn't hurt her much. Physically.

Three down, two alive and subdued, one dead when he showed a little too much fight for his own good and got treated as though he was an actual threat. _Keep moving!_ Subaru urged.

Sylvia didn't. Subaru glanced at her, saw blood, and had one of the Bureau ships teleport her out.

The rest of the mission was eventful, but not difficult. It was when they got back to the _Nemesis_ that things went wrong.

* * *

Subaru arrived to a teleport compartment that had clearly been the scene of a pitched battle. Four black-longcoated Navy Mages were positioned around it, and damage to the walls and an occasional smear of blood indicated heavy combat.

"What happened here?" Subaru muttered.

"Senior Sergeant." The black longcoat closest said. "Your casualty happened. When the medics tried to take a look at her she went nuts. We tried to subdue her, but in these tight quarters she was just too quick. She made it a few compartments aft before she stopped, and we didn't want to go in after her."

Subaru's eyebrows went up. That...didn't make much sense. "All right. I'll go talk to her."

"She won't talk, Senior Sergeant. We've tried."

Subaru gave the man a questioning look. "I'll talk to her. I'm her CO. I know her. You don't."

* * *

She was there, at the back of the compartment, back pressed against the wall. She didn't move, or speak, when Subaru arrived. "Laurens." No response. "Private Laurens." Still no response. No change in orientation of her eyes, breathing. No movement. Nothing to indicate she even heard it. Subaru took a step to the side. "Sylvia."

Sylvia still didn't respond, and Subaru noted that her junior woman's eyes didn't track the movement at all, not even a suppressed reflex. That was not a good sign; suggested catatonia. Subaru knew that Sylvia was a little sensitive about the risks involved in this job, but breaking down that badly...

Subaru didn't realize there was any danger until her hand was three millimeters short of touching Sylvia's shoulder. The other Combat Cyborg exploded into action, head jerking to look directly at Subaru, arm coming up and binding Subaru's and pulling.

If it had been almost anyone else, Sylvia would probably have pulled their arm clear out of the socket, possibly pulled it off entirely. Sylvia might have even managed to do it to a Wolkenritter. But not to an experienced Combat Cyborg. Subaru twisted, reducing the pressure, leaning into the pull until her hand made contact with the wall while a leg came up to hit Sylvia with a knee.

The other cyborg pushed Subaru away and tried to get to the door, but didn't make it. Subaru caught her three steps short.

"Divine..." Sylvia apparently knew her danger, as she spun around and hit Subaru in the face. Subaru found the strike singularly unimpressive, however, having been hit in the face by true experts at the art. "Buster!"

* * *

"What the hell happened?" Teana asked of no one in particular. She had been awake for 20 hours now and fought for two of them, including now being up for a _Ritterkreuz_ for killing a Vita clone, and her patience was wearing thin. _Nemesis_' teleport room had clearly seen better days.

"You should have seen it before we cleaned up the blood, Tea." Subaru replied. She sounded...tired. Teana rocked back on her heels as though the Combat Cyborg had struck her fairly hard. She _knew_ Subaru, and Subaru Nakajima _never_ spoke like that. Subaru was so full of optimism, had so much courage for the future. And she was never tired for more than a few moments. "Colonel. I regret to report that Private First Class Sylvia Laurens is no longer fit for duty and has had to be contained in the brig after assaulting several people and badly injuring three Navy mages."

"That's why I'm here, Senior Sergeant." Genya replied softly. "Your report on the matter was not encouraging. Has there been any change?"

"No sir." Subaru still sounded tired. "We have some hope she might snap out of it if hunger pangs or a need for water gets strong enough, but it hasn't happened yet."

Genya nodded. "Your conclusion?"

"She's catatonic, no conscious intelligence home, but her subconscious is still aware of her surroundings. Her implants are operating on emergency protocols, as they're supposed to do when or if she froze up while in combat. If somebody does anything that she regards as the least bit threatening, the implants will attempt to neutralize them and find a safe place to hole up."

Teana regarded Subaru warily. "Combat Cyborg implants can make you do something against your will?"

Genya shook his head sharply. "This is a very specific confluence of circumstances, Lieutenant, and only the Bureau's implants can do this. We could not afford to waste any Combat Cyborgs, so we included a function that should they panic and freeze under fire, the implants would take over and get them through it until they were capable of action again. It was supposed to allow them to survive and return to safety so they could be treated for their breakdown, and hopefully restored to active duty."

"Instead," Subaru said softly, "it's accidentally turned Sylvia into a killing machine with no off switch. And I wouldn't take any bets that her going catatonic in the first place is unrelated to her implants."

Genya sighed. "We knew, when we chose this path, there would be consequences we would not predict. We hoped for lesser ones, though."


	29. Over The Top: Uno

**Over The Top: Uno**

Uno dealt with many minor annoyances in life. It was a side-effect of being herself; she was made to force supercomputers to their knees by brute mental processing power. Most people seemed slower and less intelligent then her precisely because the were. It was something she had come to an uneasy acceptance of.

This minor annoyance, however, was growing more than minor. And it worried her a great deal, because it wasn't the usual sort. It was, in fact, something new and different and until recently unexperienced.

She was jealous.

There was a new addition to the Dream Team, one who, being best-suited to work with Yuuno, who was in turn best-suited to keeping her alive, had been added to their little subsection of it. Arf, Fate's familiar.

Arf's easy familiarity with Yuuno, the result of the two having worked together often, and his obvious respect for the familiar's skills, rankled Uno. And this bothered her, because it should not. She had no designs on monopolizing on the defensive mage's attention and she did not believe she was attracted to him beyond what was naturally merited by his looks and his personality.

Of course, there was an insidiousness about it. Interacting with Yuuno on a regular basis wore down one's defenses; he was just too accomplished at being nonthreatening. It was an effect Uno doubted most people even realized was happening, and something she consciously fought on occasion. There were subjects not to be discussed even with Yuuno, things he wasn't supposed to know. Uno had clearances for certain information regarding Devices and Combat Cyborg systems that no one else on the Dream Team was allowed to know.

And honestly, she felt more comfortable with a certain professional distance. It had...fewer expectations. She was not sure her understanding of social interaction was sound enough to successfully navigate proper friendship.

But jealousy came into the picture, and Uno was unsure she understood her motivations anymore. That was more than a little disturbing.

* * *

Arf had, after some prodding, adopted a less risque outfit. It wasn't baggy enough to be real Ground Forces, fitting rather too snugly below the waist, but it looked superficially like Ground Forces utilities in the same white and gold that Uno had adopted.

Planetary invasion had, so far, proved fairly boring. Uno's services had not been required for the most part, and neither had Arf's. Yuuno kept an eye on the combats the Wolkenritter and Hayate had gotten into, and at one point he had carefully deflected an Other-Reinforce. Hayate really wasn't good enough to fight them successfully. The Mistress of the Night Sky didn't quite have the skills, though she might have the power. Without the skills, it was impossible to say.

Another use, however; Uno could assess and interfere with automated defense mechanisms from a safe distance, hence she, with Arf and Yuuno for safety, were directed to accompany Genya Nakajima's command group as they examined the base Ground Forces had just secured. They happened to be handy when things went wrong for that reason.

Teana reacted first. She wasn't able to point to any specific thing that tipped her off, but she went for Cross Mirage and had the pair of pistols out a moment before the teleport happened. Arf, too, was somehow aware of threat, as she started to turn towards the teleport before it materialized.

Teana got off the first shot. For reasons she'd never understand, it worked, taking the head off a Vita clone. The body slumped forward before dissolving. The shock of it froze the intruding two partial groups of Wolkenritter in place for a moment, buying a precious half-second for the Bureau troops to bring weapons to hand and turn towards the threat.

Then the Wolkenritter all charged, directly at Genya Nakajima. The second Vita clone went through the first rank of his bodyguards like they weren't even there, but was intercepted before she could reach the target by Uno, who threw a flying body-block into the Vita. Uno still had not yet learned to fly properly, but over a distance of a couple of meters her ineptness was not a serious issue. Her ability to hit someone with all two hundred-odd kilograms of an adult Combat Cyborg was.

Neither of the Shamal clones made it. They weren't quick or skilled enough to surmount the Ground Forces troopers instantly, and were frankly wasted in close combat. Too strong, too tough, to be contained forever, but contained they were. Arf met both the Zafira clones and was pleased to note that they were, as advertized, not as quick and fast as the real thing. But she was also aware she could only buy time. Two was still too many.

Then there was the minor matter of the pair of Reinforce clones. One was dealt with spectacularly, with Nanoha crashing through the wall to stab it in the chest with Raising Heart and flick it back through the wall she'd just come in through. The following combat was spirited as Nanoha tried to give enough room to let one of the starships work, and the Reinforce clone accepted a terrible physical beating from Nanoha to prevent that.

The other one confronted Yuuno Scyra and paused a moment to size him up, then considered it wasted effort.

* * *

Uno was aware that she was probably about to die. This was an opponent beyond her rudimentary skills at close combat. She hated it. She raged against it. It lent her speed and strength to last just a little longer.

Uno's right arm had an unnatural thirty-degree bend in her forearm where there were no joints to bend. She had used her arm to stop a blow from the false Graf Eisen. A weak blow; she'd caught it early, just after it had been launched, rather than let it build up momentum. Given another three centimeters to build momentum the blow would have taken her arm off at the point of impact and left a sizable dent in her head, killing or permanently crippling her.

Another one, just like the first. Uno's pain receptors were all off, but she still thought in the back of her mind that this was going to hurt as she threw up her right arm, intending to take the blow on the upper portion this time. The blow never fell, as her opponent whirled around to strike someone behind them as a hand landed on their shoulder. There was a flash of green light, and the Vita clone was gone.

"Stop the two rippers." Yuuno's voice was raspy. Uno took a moment to visually check him for wounds, but found none. She nodded an acknowledgment as she called up a holowindow and went to work hacking the two Shamal clones' Devices into uselessness. Yuuno himself turned to go help Arf.

* * *

Repairs for this sort of damage were hard. Uno was partially disabled until they could return to Midchilda. It wasn't the mission kill it would have been on a normal human, since she could still work and even use both arms, but with all her pain receptors off it definitely interfered with her ability to function normally. She couldn't tell if something was actually making her condition worse, either, which had her doing everything very carefully.

And Arf had taken it upon herself to watch out for Uno until the damage could be fixed. Which was nice of the familiar, but not entirely welcome. The two had traded a couple glares, and Arf had formed a preliminary opinion of Uno as highly talented, highly intelligent, and sadly very much aware of both things, so somewhat egotistical.

It wasn't entirely fair, and Arf knew it. Uno did not deliberately lord it over the normal folks, but she was very much up-front about her abilities both mental and physical, and though she could back it up, even the most matter-of-fact reminders of inferiority started to wear on others.

"Arf, Uno." Nanoha's voice. Arf turned around quicker than Uno did. "Yuuno asked me to find you." Arf and Uno exchanged a glance. While it was fairly obvious who Nanoha was involved with these days, there had been rumors back in the day...

Nanoha almost giggled at the way the two reacted, like she was trying to kidnap their man. It was cute. It could also eventually cause problems, so she'd have to tell Hayate about this. "Was it something I said?"

"I am," Uno all but hissed it, "tired and angry. And I would probably be in significant pain if I couldn't turn it off. Do not jerk me around Takamachi, or Raising Heart may not appreciate you anymore." Arf glanced at Uno again and wondered if the Combat Cyborg _really_ remembered who she was talking to. Nanoha didn't nuke people for the lulz of it that Arf knew, but Arf also believed that you never poked a predator unless you had to.

Nanoha gave Uno the evil eye for a moment, and was visibly amused when the Combat Cyborg wasn't intimidated. Her reputation as the Bureau's premier kicker of ass and taker of names was earned, and frightened many, though she'd never turned her skills on someone who wasn't bucking for it pretty hard by directly attacking her. "Yuuno is fine, though he's not feeling terribly good about himself."

Arf's lips twisted into a rather unattractive frown. "It's not like they stay dead. Hell, getting teleported into solid rock might be a real quick way to go. Kinda hard to say for sure, though."

Uno, however shook her head slowly. "That particular part of growing up as a combatant is not to be dismissed quite so simply, Arf. It's easy to do, but...hard to adapt to."


	30. Over The Top: Nove

**Over The Top: Nove**

They were more or less a pickup team. Nove was aware of it, and aware that her eight Combat Cyborgs hadn't known each other long enough or trained together long enough to be treated as the sort of elite they were supposed to be.

Team Eight, Special Personnel And Tactics, was functioning reasonably well regardless. Nove had been assigned to command them, and this still left her somewhat confused as she hadn't been with the military long enough to start wondering about being leadership material. Fortunately, she had also been assigned an experienced Ground Forces sergeant to back her up so her problems were not as great as they could have been.

"Sankt Kaiser, will they just pack it in?" Nils Hepp, her team sergeant and a former Knight of the Church, muttered next to her, ducking down to avoid a low railgun burst. Even Tre and the Bureau cyborgs weren't fast enough to avoid a railgun slug in flight like they often could chemical firearm rounds, but they were plenty fast when it came to spotting the weapon turning towards them.

"If they were going to pack it in they should have done it when the Navy stomped on their fleet's face." Nove replied, and brought up both her Gun Knuckle and its identical twin which had been provided for her before this mission, snapping off a burst of rapid fire at the offending railgun position before she too hit the dirt. "Eight to Command, we've blocked them. They're deploying their heavy weapons and forming to assault."

The New Belkan forces left on the planet had abandoned their fixed bases, but had still entertained a belief they might engage the Bureau's ground troops in a stand-up fight. It had been a fool's hope. They had neither teleport capability nor starship support, whereas Genya Nakajima had both. He had used those abilities to box his opponents and smash them between the anvil of his regiment and the hammer of Bureau starships in close support.

Nove and Team Eight were sitting on the New Belkan escape route off the grassy plain on which they had been trapped and into forested, broken terrain that would provide them a measure of protection from the eyes of the Bureau cruisers.

Nils had a rifle, not dissimilar from Vice's, as his weapon. He took a moment to sight in and killed the operator on the railgun, but the assistant took the operator's place almost at once. It didn't matter, though, because the first wave of New Belkans came at them.

"Rapid fire!" Nove yelled to her team. "Show them we are nobody to be fucked with!" A quick, subtle distinction she'd learned from Nils; sometimes it was the volume of the command that carried its force.

Team Eight was a ranged combat team. They had all been issued cartridge-capable Devices, designed for ranged combat. They were Combat Cyborgs; their focus and ability to number-crunch was unmatched, and the sort of mass packet attacks other B-rank mages, like Teana Lanster and her Crossfire, struggled to control were simple to them.

The storm of packet attacks tore the heart out of the first wave before it made it ten meters from its start point. For every ten people in the first rank, nine fell; for every ten in the second rank, eight. But they didn't stop. Nove smiled grimly. Brave. But they way they came, in solid walls, they'd never fought somebody with ranged attacks of this power.

But they were incredibly brave. If they had been Midchildan, if they had been from _any_ other post-industrial age society, they would have broken. They would have stopped, gone to ground to get away from it, turned and run, anything but charged directly into fire. They would have known that it was suicide to come straight at them, straight up the hill, the easiest possible shot. They would have let their railguns work the hill over and come up under covering fire.

But they didn't know. They'd never fought an opponent where it mattered. They kept sending in new waves and those new waves kept falling, as Nove and her team grimly shot them down. Nove was reasonably sure they had expended at least five hundred people to advance no more than thirty meters.

It was so intensely, incredibly stupid. And it was about to get worse. One of the great white-and-black shapes of a cruiser had drifted towards this end of the battle.

"Team Eight, this is _Nemesis_. Regimental command just gave us tasking to you. Call it."

"_Nemesis_, Team Eight. One hundred meters to my direct front or base of the hill, whichever is further."

"_Nemesis_ copies. Cover your ears."

Thunder and murder from a clear sky. Starship guns in area suppression mode were an impersonal, mechanistic means of dealing death; the crew set the killbox for the gun, and the gun proceeded to saturate it at two rounds a second in a pattern determined by its computers. Even then, even faced with an opponent they could neither flee nor fight, the New Belkans did not break.

They didn't even crouch. They came up the hill, heads held high, until they crumpled under fire. Some small part of Nove's mind was screaming at them to do _anything_, to take even the most reflexive, instinctual action to save their lives. Even when their units were in tatters or they were the last one left for twenty meters in any direction, they kept coming without a thought of pause or retreat.

They showed the finest courage and contempt for the odds. But not one of them made it within forty meters of the positions Nove had chosen for her team and from that distance they may as well have been on a different continent. After a few minutes, Nove gave the cease-fire order when targets stopped presenting themselves.

So brave. So futile. So monumentally, criminally stupid. They had thrown away their lives so _eagerly_, when the uselessness of it was clear to any idiot. Nove wasn't sure whether she should pity their ignorance or sneer at it.

Then she abruptly recalled something she'd heard from Vita and became very still.

Was this what it had been like to be a Wolkenritter in the bad old days? And was she being terribly unfair to the men and women she had just killed?


	31. Quattro: Here At The End Of All Things

**Quattro: Here At The End Of All Things**

They called it Last Post Station. It orbited nothing in particular, save the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, and was far from any star or planet or even nebula. Here between the arms of the galaxy, there was only the endless black void of space.

You did not come to Last Post by choice. It was a hardship posting: isolated from the teleport grid and hence communications, so news and mail were slow, and transfers slower. The permanent residents offered little to recommend it either. A small group of manumitted familiars, drawing on the station's own magical power source rather than a mage, tight-knit but friendly enough to human personnel that passed through. And then there were the people that you never saw, the people whom the Bureau had wanted to remove as far from any bright and kind place in the universe as it could.

The Time-Space Administrative Bureau had no _actual_ death penalty. But it could send you to imprisonment at Last Post Station, and that was a death of sorts. An inmate passed beyond the knowledge of the world at large, beyond contact with any other human even in a highly filtered form. Total solitude was generally poor for sanity, too, an effect that the Bureau officially deplored but considered an unavoidable consequence of the fact these people were simply that dangerous.

* * *

Quattro had been at Last Post Station for four months. There was endless material to read or watch, since she was one of the few inmates who didn't have some sort of murder-involved paraphilia. Three walls of her cell, the floor, and the ceiling could made transparent for a view of the universe, which had been intensely unnerving at first but which she had grown to appreciate.

Though here there was little, nothing really, to see. A sky full of stars, and not one but two arms of the galaxy, but the light was dim. Quattro could easily read a book by starlight on any world in the Bureau, would barely even notice it was dark for that purpose. But here it was hard, almost impossible.

And she was only allowed a couple physical books anyways. One she never opened, never touched; the second edition copy of Olivie's _On Evil_ that had once graced Tre's cell, sent by the older cyborg. Quattro found it wholly inadequate as a peace offering, and the philosophy it expounded on wholly naive. There was no evil, there was only the advance of knowledge and the things that held it back. Something these cretins failed to grasp.

She looked out at the endless vista of the universe. Here, unlike everywhere else, there was a black spot. Here, unlike everywhere else, there was a place you could look and see no stars; a place where you were looking out, outside the galaxy, between the arms into endless blackness. It looked larger every time she saw it.

She knew that wasn't true. She could prove it, in fact. Quattro was a Combat Cyborg and advanced visual processing was built in. Every time she looked at it a few milliseconds later she knew exactly how much of her field of view it took up, and it was always the same.

Eternal darkness. Eternal nothingness. Quattro hated herself for fearing it, because it was so _unreasoned_, so _instinctual_. There was nothing scientific about it, nothing rational. But that fear of being swallowed by the endless night never quite went away.

Quattro was aware, too, how tightly she clung to news from the outside world. News of the war, among other things. She didn't know the Doctor had passed on the knowledge for Combat Cyborgs to the Bureau. She did know that the Bureau had recently won a victory at place they were calling Iorgu, and that however weak she thought her sisters they had played a great role in winning it.

The bittersweet memories of the Doctor on the cusp of victory were tinged now with shame. Shame she had been caught up in his zeitgeist, realization that Chrono's efforts would have doomed it all and that she would be dead but for her defeat by Nanoha. The Doctor had, just that once, been wrong.

It was a shattering, world-changing realization for her. And Quattro hated that because in that shattering she saw danger. This place, the emptiness, the lack of contact, was a formidable enemy. The quiet desperation for human contact was in its own way as effective at breaking a mind as any torture or trauma. Quattro could not afford any weakness or doubt if she was to hold the dreadful silence at bay.

So she ignored the revelation of Jail's fallibility as best she could. It was easier than it might have been, since Quattro did not interact with him and thus did not have cause to think about her father much. Still, it was a battle she was slowly losing. Jail composed a huge part of her experience and her life.

She regarded the station itself. A featureless wall of metal, it appeared to be, and might well have been considering the Bureau's ability to call on mages to sculpt large projects, a single solid sheet. Here between the galactic arms there were no objects to scar the perfection of the unpainted metal, and it glinted dully in places. No other cells were visible. Each side of the station served as a "wing" with the particular types of criminal. On one, murderers, on another, rapists. Quattro was the only person who occupied the wing for traitors, for they hadn't had a better classification for her. While treason was a terrible crime, few traitors were so dangerous _after_ capture as to be sent to Last Post. Fewer still remained sane long after getting there, since they didn't have the warped psychology of the other inmates.

_If you turn around the darkness will have grown_. It was unbidden but her thoughts. _If you turn around, you'll find it creeping across your bed, reaching for you with black fingers..._

It wasn't true. She knew it wasn't true. She shook it off, or tried to, but it was not so easy. Her skin started to crawl. She held off the urge for several minutes, but eventually she looked. The black spot was the same size as always, in the same place. _But you don't really know what it was doing when your back was turned._

She cancelled the transparency effect and summoned up something to read._  
_

* * *

Her jailers noted Quattro had begun to sleep with the light on. They didn't see this; they had no direct view of her cell, only medical monitoring telemetry. But the extra power draw during her periods of inactivity was an obvious correlation. To this fact, the jailers simply nodded to themselves. Everyone did it eventually, though Quattro had taken much longer than most.


	32. Sein: The Rights of Children

I know Sein is supposed to be goofy and fun...but I had to develop Serious Sein for this chapter. And honestly, I rather like her.

**Sein: The Rights of Children**

The incident with the Huckebein had fallout. The fact the Sankt Kaiser had apparently manifested via Vivio was a big deal for the Saint Church, of course, but there were other repercussions, ones that were not immediately predictable. Ones that, in fact, were rather problematic as far as Sisters Schach and Gracia were concerned. Sein and Otto had reacted in the completely opposite fashion from everyone else. And their reaction was not actually unreasonable, so they had managed to convince Drei as well.

"The only person with a right to the use of Vivio's body," Sein said, her normally jokey manner gone, "is Vivio."

"But if that was actually Olivie Segbrecht-" Carim began.

Sein slammed her fist into the table, causing the stone surface to crack; the strength of a Combat Cyborg sharply underlined. "It _doesn't matter_, Sister. You taught me that. You taught me how wrong it is to tamper with someone's psyche for any reason." Sein's voice rose in a furious shout. "And now you'd simply _erase_ Vivio! Not tamper with her, _erase_ her!" The Combat Cyborg's voice dropped. "Evil is to deprive. Where are the members of the Saint Church here?"

Carim Gracia recoiled, nearly knocking her chair over backwards in the motion. That cut; it cut deep. Being called out on basic matters of doctrine by a novice was never a pleasant experience. And worse, she wasn't actually as sure of her own position as she'd been trying to project, and had hoped Sein would be easier to convince. Sein, however, was not going to be steamrolled.

Carim closed her eyes. "You are...correct." That hurt too. She didn't like to think of herself as having an ego, but she wasn't blind enough to pretend it didn't exist. "But what can be done about it? There are others who will be more committed than me, Sein."

"As long as Drei thinks the same way I do, and as long as Drei is officially or unofficially Vivio's teacher, no one can can touch Vivio without Drei's permission." Sein said. There were advantages to having world-killing magical constructs about, if you were nice to them. "If worst comes to worst, we inform Vivio's mother we cannot guarantee her child's safety, and then find a really big rock to hide under." There was a brief pause, and Sein directed a questioning look at Carim. "Besides, how did you think you were going to get away with this in front of Nanoha Takamachi?"

Carim shuddered. Nanoha Takamachi would kill them all if something happened to Vivio; not in cold blood, but with a smile on her lips and song in her heart. That was something that _hadn't_ been considered. "An excellent point, Sein."

* * *

Otto and Drei, meanwhile, had been chatting with the monster under the bed.

Sein could think of no other way to describe the man. Jail had once cursed him, cursed his deviousness and his ability to plan, and Jail was no fool in those things, nor one given to admissions of defeat that lead to cursing. And this was indeed the bogeyman: when Sein had been younger she had sometimes found herself checking under her bed and in her closet for Captain Muhammad al-Faddil.

The black longcoat of a Navy mage; the grey pin at the color, a fanciful cloud of smoke, that indicated Naval Counterintelligence. The dark hair, a skin tone too tanned for Midchildan or Belkan, and the sharp, clear brown eyes completed the picture. There was no one else it could be.

The Captain affected an aimless geniality. Sein was not fooled. Neither, apparently, was Carim Gracia. "Captain. Why are you here?" The tone Carim used caused Drei to abruptly straighten up and regard the man much more closely, where she had previously dismissed him as any sort of threat. The Captain had turned towards them, and Sein would swear she could feel the heat from his eyes on her skin.

Just her imagination.

"To prevent anyone from taking irreversible actions, Knight-Captain Gracia." Muhammad replied. "And on a personal note, to ensure that the Navy continues to look after its own. Vivio Takamachi is the daughter of fact, if not of law, to a naval officer. Her loss would be..._deplorable_." The tone of the final word carried far more meaning than the actual statement. Any attempt at an action that could or would harm Vivio would have serious consequences.

"We are on the same side, Captain." Sein said shortly. "We were tasked to protect Vivio. And the destruction of a life that is not intentionally threatening other lives is anathema to everything the Church believes. If others require correction on the basic doctrines of the Church, we will provide."

"Sister Sein speaks the truth." Drei added. "This child is my charge and I will not surrender it while I can still fight."

The Captain raised an eyebrow. "That is quite comforting, actually. Nonetheless, if you require assistance, I will be happy to provide. Knight-Captain Gracia knows how to reach me."

* * *

It started two days later. A squad of Church Knights lead by a Knight-Commander that Sein had not seen before arrived, to take control of Vivio's security. Carim stalled them for about an hour, but ultimately they would not take her orders. So Drei stepped in, and offered no pleasantries. To the Reinforce there was only the hard, cold truth. "Knight-Commander. This child is under my protection, and I will not relinquish that responsibility while I still draw breath. I do not care where or with who your orders originated." There was an uncomfortable shifting among the squad of Church Knights. If Drei decided something was important enough to her to warrant the use of force, then nothing less than a combat starship was capable of arguing the point. Mere humans might as well spit on Drei as try to fight her, it would be just as effective and probably offend her less.

Sein and Schach both looked rather uncomfortable too. If Drei got annoyed, she could and probably would make an incredible mess out of the school and Church retreat, not to mention many kilometers of surrounding territory. Drei could, of course, simply shove someone around with barriers or binds until they got the message, but the Reinforce clone seemed in the mood to make an example of someone.

And like all her kind, Drei made examples of people by making them ground zero for a multi-kiloton explosion. Otto, who was being kept updated by Sein, sincerely hoped that the Reinforce clone was putting on a show and not really on the verge of going quite literally nuclear. After all, that would mean that the Church had failed. Otto had failed. And a lot of people would die correcting the mistake.

Otto let out a sigh as the squad of Church Knights withdrew without further testing the patience of Vivio's guardians. Vivio herself looked up from a book. "Visitors?"

"Impolite ones." Otto replied. "They reckoned without the fact that Drei is capable of being far more impolite than they are."

Vivio looked confused. "Drei is ever impolite?"

Otto smiled. "It depends on how greatly you upset her. Too much, and she starts swearing in languages that don't exist anymore." While this was probably true, Otto had trouble picturing it. And so for that matter did Vivio. Drei would start casting before she started yelling, and when Drei started casting it probably wouldn't leave witnesses.

* * *

Training, of course, continued. Vivio was determined to be as good as her mamas, in the utterly serious fashion that only a child can be. But now, something often intruded. Vivio would, for just a moment stand a little straighter, move a little faster, than she should. Both Sein and Otto noticed it. Both had concluded that Olivie was showing through, though they were unclear on details. Drei decided to force the issue. She didn't consult anyone beforehand, because she never would have gotten permission.

Since her method involved putting Vivio in actual danger of her life.

But it did work.

The change was quick, but somehow not subtle. It was immediately obvious; a change of stance, the expression different, and the block Vivio threw with Wahrheit was something she could never have actually managed. Drei held her own blade, made of energy, against the sword and smiled. "Do I have your attention?"

"You do." The voice was not Vivio's either.

"You are inhabiting my charge. A child, not yet ten. Your clone, admittedly, but she has a mind and a life of her own. This is not acceptable." Drei was forthright. She also did not relax the pressure against Wahrheit, as her knowledge of under what conditions Olivie surfaced was too vague. It might require an active threat.

"I am aware of this. I do not particularly appreciate it, but have few options in this." Olivie didn't relax her guard either.

Drei smiled faintly and extended her free hand. "Of course you do."

But Olivie/Vivio recoiled, and a moment later the change was gone. "Drei?" That was definitely in Vivio's voice.

The Reinforce shook her head. "Nothing, Vivio." The blade in her hand dissipated and she gave the child in an adult body a quick hug. "Just trying to talk to someone." Unlike Olivie, Vivio did not appear aware of what went on when the other personality was in control, and they had not told her...mainly because they could not figure out a way to explain it to someone of Vivio's age.

_What did you try to do? _Schach demanded of Drei.

_A Unison does not require another complete person. Only a second personality. I am proof of that, as it is how I operated with your Hayate Yagami. I could...take Olivie into myself. We would be one person. But she knows my history. She will not do it. _Drei replied.

Schach nearly fell to her knees. Contact with Drei's mind...there was no experience she could compare it to. There was an immense, crushing sorrow that the Reinforce clone carried, enough many times over to break the mind of a being without the natural defenses of a Wolkenritter. Beyond that was a force of will that was far stronger than anyone else Schach had ever made contact with. Schach was all but certain that a rebuke from Drei telepathically would strike as if it were a physical blow.

It took her several moments to recover completely, and by the time she had, Vivio was a child again, and talking animatedly with Otto. And they were no closer to solving the problem.


	33. Sette: Big Sister

The references to the Inter-Middle are a sort of nod to the fact that ViVid did not, and will not, happen in this universe. (And if it did, Vivio would be disqualified on the grounds of Olivie.)

**Sette: Big Sister**

Life in transition did not agree with Sette. She was used to stability and order. Going straight into military service and not accepting the offer of Genya Nakajima to adopt her into his much-expanded family had been her recognition that she just wasn't cut out for an unstructured life. Here, under the capable tutelage of a Senior Mage Specialist, she found a comforting order.

But the team was in transition, converting to an all-Cyborg unit. That meant Sette would stay, but Bei would go. It was clear neither he nor her commanding officer were pleased with this. While Sette didn't think it was because her CO did not trust anyone else to supervise or teach Sette, she could not rule it out. One of the few emotions that Sette had _never_ been without was self-conscious or self-critical embarrassment, which Quattro's tampering had left intact because it was a useful training tool.

Add that to her disquiet over the changes already, and she was having a very bad day. At least in Sette terms. Certainly not the sort of day she wanted to see her self-adoptive brother and sister. But they wanted to see her. And she regarded it as a duty rather than something she could avoid.

"Sette!" Isis was always happy to see her.

"Sette." Tohma was too, but...he was still trying to emulate Sette. It thus disconcerted him a great deal to have Sette smile at him in response. Sette had gotten much better at smiling now, much more natural and less like she was trying to pretend she was human.

"Auntie Tre!" Isis added, and rushed past Sette after she'd hugged both her self-adoptees. Tre had a look that suggested she had no idea what to do upon being promoted to family, but she realized it wouldn't be smart to not to give the littlest Cyborg a hug.

That left Sette with Tohma, and she patted his shoulder. "We should talk." He looked comforted to hear her trademark monotone, and she shook her head in genuine frustration.

"Tohma. You want to be like me, yes?" Sette asked softly. Volume only; not tone. She still came across as somebody wearing a human suit more often than she didn't.

"Yes." Tohma confirmed. He couldn't match her tonelessness. Some of his desire to do that leaked out.

"You...probably cannot." Sette said softly. "There is much about me that is admirable, I suppose. But you must know that much of what I am was done to me by a sister, and was done unkindly. You could become a Combat Cyborg, and should it become possible I will support you in doing so." She paused. "But this wanting to be like me in all things. Even I do not want to be like me. You should consider that."

Tohma looked rather surprised. "But you're never afraid, and after all this, I'd...really like to be never afraid."

Sette tried on a sigh. It actually seemed to work, from Tohma's reaction. "I do not fear because I was _made_ not to fear. It is not natural. It is not something that can be learned. And it caused a great deal of trouble when I was younger." Tohma was visibly upset by this and Sette leaned down and gave him a hug. "You need to learn not to fear things that should not be feared, Tohma. I cannot teach you that, but I know people who can."

That seemed to satisfy him for now, but Sette didn't think his interest in being more like his new role model was over. She gave another hug to Isis, and nodded to her request that they go shopping.

* * *

It wasn't actually shopping, not really. The deeply personalized nature of most Devices ensured that. Still even with a war on, there were young mages who needed their first Device. Isis gravitated almost at once to a selection of bracelet and glove types. Isis had been taught to use a blade, before the Bureau had saved her from a premature biological burnout, but that's the past. She has no desire to do that again.

Tohma didn't appear interested in any of them. His parents had not been mages, so he was not inheriting a tradition. Cyborg Inherent Equipment tended to be bulky and unmanageable for non-Cyborgs, so he couldn't copy Sette here. He drifted past a selection of Devices modeled after ones belonging to Inter-Middle finalists, Sette behind him silent as his shadow.

Tohma admires that. He knows she is not light and catlike, his adopted big sister is actually quite heavy, but she manages such silence regardless. One of many things about her he admires. Something he hopes to one day learn. He stops in front of an array of old, Belkan-style Devices, many of them in forms that have come close to passing out of active use. The dispay is more meant as a historical curiosity than a real effort to give someone more options, but Tohma doesn't know that. Picks one up.

It is like a long glove. Slowly, he slips it on. It fits well. And he clenches his fist. A solid plate of armor, three centimeters thick, appears as he clenches. It is flat, covering the outer side of his arm and spreading beyond it, curving around to cover the front of his fist as well. Unmarked, and unadorned, like the glove itself, it has the dull glint of worked metal. But it has no apparent weight as he moves his arm. He extends his fingers again, trying to touch it, but opening his fist causes the plate to vanish.

Sette watched, curiously. "I do not recognize that design."

Tohma looked up in shock. Sette knew everything, or at least that was what it seemed like to him. "You don't?"

"It's only part of a set, might be confusing her." Tre added. "Belkan King's Plate. Device and armor both. Royal Family members and Royal Guard exclusive, wasn't very popular even with them. But it'll do everything a normal Device will do."

"I want it," Tohma said softly.


End file.
